India largest source of govt. info requests, says Twitter

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Twitter has released the biannual Twitter Transparency Report. The report shares details on the number of government and legal requests, removal requests and data around accounts actioned for various violations.

Key Findings of the Report: 

Government’s Request for Account Information:

• Globally, Twitter received 14,561 government requests for account information in the six-month period from June to December 2020.
  • Among these requests, 3,615 requests were from India. This is an increase of about 38% for India from the first half of the year when the number of such requests stood at 2,613.
• Governments and law enforcement agencies submitted approximately 15% more information requests compared to the previous reporting period.
• The compliance rate for government information requests was 30% globally and 0.6% in India.

Country-wise:

• India was the single largest source of government requests for account information that Twitter received during this period. It accounted for 25% of the global volume.
• The second highest volume of information requests originated from the United States, comprising 22% of global information requests.

Legal Demands to Remove Content:

• Twitter received more than 38000 legal demands to remove the content of around 1.3 lakh accounts.
  • The platform withheld or otherwise removed some or all of the reported content in response to 29% of these global legal demands.
• For India, the number of legal requests stood at 6,971, an increase of 151% from 2,772 such requests in the first six months of 2020.
  • Twitter withheld 60 accounts and 598 tweets. In addition, 1,310 accounts were either suspended or some content was removed.