Twitter, the micro-blogging website is a gathering place for many people. And in recent years, the popularity of the social platform has grown at a considerable rate. Millions of Indian users, politicians, actors, public figures have made Twitter a platform where they can announce something or have people listen to their words. But in a recent development, the Indian government had requested information about 422 Twitter accounts from July to December of 2018. Even the law enforcement agencies of the country asked the platform to remove 667 accounts from Twitter as they violated the law of the country. This deletion of 667 accounts had grown from 2017’s 237 account deletion request.
Twitter released its 14th Biannual Transparency Report on Thursday. In it, the social-platform provided some information to the Indian government in 18% of the cases. Out of the government’s 667 accounts removal from Twitter the company complied with only 2% of them. Other than that, there were 49 emergency disclosure requests made by the Indian government. In it, Twitter provided them with only 10% of the information requested.
Earlier, from January to June 2018 period, the Indian government had asked Twitter about 355 account information. Also, the government asked the micro-blogging website to preserve information of 100 Twitter accounts. To this, the platform specified 30 of the 100 requested accounts.
About this, Twitter said, “Upon receipt of a valid preservation request, we will temporarily preserve, but not disclose, a snapshot of the relevant account information for 90 days pending issuance and service of the valid legal process.”
But its not just the Indian government requests for account information from the micro-blogging platform. Other governments from other countries request such information as well. and this time, Twitter has received the account information request from 86 countries in total.
Out of all the account information request Twitter receives, the United States requests comprises only 30% of the total request. And the second highest account request information received by Twitter is Japan which is 24% of the global information request. In that order, the UK has made 13% request while India has made 6% of the total global requests. Germany has made 6% of the requests, France with 5% and together all of them combines at 30% which is the United States’ total request made to the platform.
Vijaya Gadde, Legal, Policy and Trust & Safety Lead at Twitter said, “We received roughly 8 percent fewer global legal requests to remove content, impacting approximately 2 percent fewer accounts, compared to the previous reporting period. However, there was an 84 percent increase year-over-year between 2017 and 2018.”
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