As Wikipedia prepares to go dark in protest, prospects for controversial online anti-piracy laws have dimmed in Congress. Now that Wikipedia has committed to such a bold move, will other tech, blogs or media companies follow? In some cases, the answers is clearly yes: Reddit and BoingBoing, for instance, have both said that they’ll be doing a ‘blackout.”

Online pressure to rethink anti-piracy bills that threaten the Internet industries, security and online free speech continues to build, although, as the New York Times reported, many still expect these online piracy bills invite a protracted battle. There are, as it turns out, quite a few people willing to stand up to these bills.

As I wrote in December, one of the big unanswered questions about the Stop Online Piracy Act and its companion bill in the Senate, the PROTECT IP Act, is whether Internet companies would directly engage hundreds of millions of users to advocate against the bill for them in Washington, in the way that Tumblr did last November. To date, Facebook and Google have not committed to doing so.

Today, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo indicated to me that the California-based social media company that he leads will not being ‘shutting down’ on Wednesday — but that it would also continue to be ‘very active.’ The Guardian has picked up on our exchange, publishing a story that focused upon mischaracterized Costolo’s response to a question about Twitter shutting down as him calling Wikipedia’s SOPA protest as ‘silly.’ What Costolo made clear later when Wales asked him about the story, however, is that he was referring to Twitter making such a choice, not Wikipedia.

Following is a storify of the relevant tweets, along with some context for them.

http://storify.com/digiphile/if-twitter-is-against-sopa-should-it-blackout-in-p.js

[View the story “If Twitter is against SOPA, should it blackout in protest?” on Storify]

My sense is that, of all of the major social media players — which in 2012 now include Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Tumblr and MySpace, amongst others — Twitter has been one of the leaders in the technology community for sticking up for its users where it can, particularly with respect to the matter of fighting to make Twitter subpoena from the U.S. Justice Department regarding user data public.

Whether or not Twitter ultimately decides to “shut down” or “black out,” Twitter’s general counsel, Alex Macgillivray deserves all due credit for that decision and others, along with the lucid blog post that explained how SOPA would affect ordinary, non-infringing users.

For a fuller explanation of why these issues stuff matters, I highly recommend reading “Consent of the Networked,” a new must-read book on Internet freedom by former CNN journalist and co-founder of Global Voices Rebecca MacKinnon. These sorts of decisions and precedents are deeply important in the 21st century, when much of what people think of as speech in the new public square is hosted upon the servers of private services like Twitter, Facebook and Google.

This post has been updated to clarify Costolo’s position, with respect to how the Guardian framed his initial response.