Twitter CEO: 'You don't pull the batteries out of the microphone'

Twitter did not participate in the recent online "blackouts," in which Wikipedia and others made their websites inaccessible to U.S. visitors for a day, because it would have been counterproductive, the company's CEO said Monday night.
"You don't pull the batteries out of the microphone," Dick Costolo told audience members during an onstage interview at News Corp.'s D: Dive Into Media conference here.
Instead, Twitter proved to be a key platform for people exchanging information about the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and similar proposed legislation, Costolo said. About 3.9 million messages about SOPA and its sister bill, PIPA, were posted to Twitter on January 18, the day of the blackout, he said.
After a huge outcry online, both bills have since been shelved.
Addressing the new censorship policy that Twitter announced last week to much outrage and confusion, Costolo maintained that his company has taken the right approach. He repeatedly said that scholars would one day determine that Twitter had made the right move.
"I think it's a super-complex issue," Costolo said. "It takes a while for the scholars and the people who have studied these issues to chime in."

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