Load the Game

Twitter data requests from governments growing

• Egon Kilin
• February 10th, 2015

Twitter has released its transparency report detailing what kind of requests the service receives from governments and government agencies across the world since July 2014. From the report, BBC News detailed that Twitter had received 40% more requests across the globe to take down content, as well as to release account data of various user accounts since its last transparency report published in July 2014. From the report, we find out that Turkey and the United States were the most to send out requests to Twitter to either take down content or to release user data.

Seeing hundreds of requests from Turkey shouldn’t be a surprise, as the Turkish government had already tried banning Twitter in the country in the past. The report from Twitter details that Turkey filed 356 requests to reveal data about Twitter users. Needless to say, Twitter didn’t comply with any of these requests, although the reasons why they didn’t weren’t revealed.

The United States government filed more than 1600 requests for account data, and Twitter said it complied with 80 % of them, sending out user information to the government, supposedly on warranted grounds. At the same time, the Turkish government sent out 477 requests to Twitter, asking the service to delete content from their databases. Twitter senior manager of legal policy Jeremy Kessel revealed that these requests mostly concerned violations of personal rights of citizens and public persons.

Russia also came in with more requests since July, as Twitter revealed that it had sent 91 requests for content take-down, few of which were complied to by the service, because they mainly attempted to crack down on demonstrations which did not infer violence or endorsement of illegal drugs. The number of requests asking Twitter to remove content grew by 84 % since July 2014, but mostly due to Russia and Turkey attempting to silence freedom of speech against the government.