In the period July to December 2020, India was the single greatest source of government demands for account information received by Twitter, accounting for 25% of the global total, according to the micro blogging platform. According to Twitter’s new transparency report, the country also placed second in the number of legal requests for material removal after Japan.
Twitter publishes a biannual report that includes information on the amount of government and legal requests, removal requests, and statistics on accounts that have been suspended for various infractions and rules violations. In a recent blog post, Twitter stated that it delivered some or all of the required information in response to 30% of global government information requests from July to December 2020.”India is the single largest source of government information requests, accounting for 25% of global volume and 15% of global accounts listed,” according to the report. The United States had the second-highest volume of information requests, accounting for 22% of all requests worldwide, according to the report. Twitter received 38,524 legal demands to remove content from 1, 31,933 accounts during the reporting period (July-December 2020).
In response to 29% of these global legal demands, the platform withheld or removed some or all of the reported content. “Although the number of legal demands Twitter received decreased by 9% from the previous reporting period, these requests requested content removal from the biggest number of accounts ever in a single reporting period,” Twitter stated.
Only five countries (in decreasing order) accounted for about 94% of the total global volume of legal demands: Japan, India, Russia, Turkey, and South Korea.361 legal demands were made against the accounts of 199 verified journalists and news outlets from around the world, according to the US-based firm, up 26% from the previous reporting period. It’s worth noting that Twitter has been chastised in India for failing to follow IT regulations despite repeated warnings from the government. Twitter is a social media platform that allows people to communicate with one another.
To comply with the new IT standards, Twitter recently established a Resident Grievance Officer, only days after naming a Chief Compliance Officer. It also released its first India Transparency Report on Sunday. From July to December 2020, impressions on violative tweets amounted for less than 0.1 percent of all impressions for all tweets globally, according to Twitter’s blog.
The amount of views a violative tweet obtained before it was removed is captured by the impressions measure. 3.8 million Tweets that violated Twitter’s guidelines were removed during this time. Prior to removal, around 77% of these had received fewer than 100 impressions, 17% had received between 100 and 1,000 impressions, and 6% had received more than 1,000 impressions.
