Micro blogging site Twitter has applied its local censorship policy for the first time, by blocking access to a neo-Nazi account to users in Germany.

Following a request by the German government, tweets from the far-right Besseres Hannover account will no longer be visible to users in the country, although the rest of the world will still be able to view them.

Twitter introduced a new policy in January whereby the site could block specific content in certain countries if an account posted tweets that violated local laws.

This is the first time the polic has been enacted and in a statement Twitter said, "With hundreds of millions of Tweets posted every day around the world, our goal is to respect our users' expression, while also taking into consideration applicable local laws."

Prosecutors in Lower-Saxony have launched a probe against 20 members of the neo-Nazi group, accusing them of inciting racial hatred and threatning Germany's social affairs minister Aygul Ozkan.

Written and presented by Alfred Joyner