At some point in the last few days, Twitter closed a loophole that allowed users to view tweets and profiles that are censored due to government and court requests, Entrackr has found. Twitter implements account and tweet blocking in a particular country by displaying a message for that country’s users saying that “This tweet has been withheld” there due to local laws or a legal demand.
But a significant loophole in this policy allowed users in any country to escape censorship of tweets. Simply changing an account’s country from the Account settings allowed users to see all content that was available freely in the country of their selection. This is no longer the case globally. Twitter now appears to use users’ IP addresses to figure out how to apply censorship for their Twitter feed.