Our View: Look beyond the controversy and see that Twitter’s new censorship policy is a win for free speech.

On Friday, Twitter announced changes to its censorship policy, allowing country-specific restrictions of tweets. On the coattails of the passionate protests of the Stop Online Piracy and Protect Internet Protocol acts, the Internet was instantly aflame with allegations that the policy threatens free speech and free expression.

But, like most issues, there’s more to it than that.

The new system would allow countries and private businesses to submit complaints that a certain tweet or user account violates local laws, such as Germany’s strict laws against pro-Nazi speech or China’s laws against criticizing the government.

If Twitter found the complaint was justified under local laws, the tweet would be replaced with a gray box — in that country only — explaining that it had been censored and linking to an explanation of the complaint. This information also would be available online at ChillingEffects.org.

Previously, when Twitter received such a request, its only option was to take down the tweet on a global level, making it inaccessible from any country.

Twitter’s own statement on the issue and the site’s Terms of Service admit that it was already removing tweets in this way in response to legal challenges, as most Web companies do.

This new system means less censorship, because the tweets will be taken down only within the country making the complaint and will remain available to all other users.

It is a pragmatic way for the company to abide by the laws of the nations it operates within while still protecting as much speech as possible — much more than was protected under the old policy.

It also will increase the transparency of Twitter’s censorship. Before, there was no way to track what was being removed and at whose request.

Now, this information will be available on the censored tweet itself and in an online database, allowing users to track which countries are censoring tweets and under what justification.

We understand, and appreciate, that the gut reaction to any censorship policy is outrage. It took us three editorial meetings to work through the problem and choose a side. But it’s important to look at the policy in the context of what it is replacing.

Far from cowardly giving in to political pressure from censors, as many have accused, Twitter is leading the pack by offering an innovative system for lessening the current level of censorship and providing unprecedented transparency in the process.

That doesn’t mean the policy is perfect. Twitter should go forward with the local-level censorship while more precisely defining what it is and is not willing to restrict access to.

A look at Google’s Transparency Report shows that, while it is more than willing to comply with local pornography and defamation laws, it has frequently denied censorship that is blatantly politically motivated and would harm free speech.

Twitter should follow this example and offer users an explicit promise of the same to quell their fears.

Keep Twitter honest. Users can demand Twitter create an explicit policy to protect free speech by joining us in tweeting with the hashtag #PromiseFreeSpeech. But this should go beyond Twitter.

Now that the kinds of censorship already quietly happening across the web have been exposed, all social media companies must adopt similar policies to increase transparency and limit censorship.

And users, in the U.S. and across the globe, shouldn’t stand for anything less.

When two U.S. censorship bills recently threatened the open nature of the Internet, users came together in a massive blackout and protest push that resulted in the shelving of the legislation.

But this fervor shouldn’t be reserved for these one-time big events. It is a continuous battle to protect free speech online and off.

We’re ready to commit for the long haul. Are you?