Government requests to have the content removed from Twitter reached an all-time high in the first half of 2021, according to the social media giant.
Twitter’s Transparency Center reported in a blog post that governments submitted 43,387 legal demands for content to be removed from 196,878 accounts between January 1 and June 30, the largest amount since the company began publishing transparency reports in 2012.
“We’re facing unprecedented challenges as governments around the world increasingly attempt to intervene and remove content,” the company’s vice president of global public policy and philanthropy Sinéad McSweeney is quoted as saying. “This threat to privacy and freedom of expression is a deeply worrying trend that requires our full attention.”
Interestingly, Japan, Russia, Turkey, India, and South Korea were the top five countries making such requests, accounting for 95 per cent of all removal requests worldwide. In response to 54% of the requests, the platform “withheld” access to information or requested that accounts remove posts.
According to the study, the United States became the single largest source of government information requests, accounting for 24 per cent of all requests received by the organization during the most recent reporting period, with 3,026 requests.
These requests accounted for 27% of all identified accounts from around the world, and Twitter cooperated with 68 per cent of these requests, in whole or in part, from the US.
In response to 64 per cent of global government information requests, Twitter partially disclosed or did not share information, a drop of 9% over the previous reporting period.
Forsided, 27.01.2022
Source: Sputnik New