New Delhi: The Indian government asked Twitter for data on 2,200 user accounts in the January-June 2021 period and the micro-blogging platform complied with just 2 percent of the requests.
There were also nearly 5,000 legal demands to remove Twitter accounts from India in the reporting period, the company’s latest transparency report has revealed.
Global government preservation requests decreased by 4 percent, while accounts specified increased by 24 percent during this reporting period. The US (57 percent) and India (25 percent) together accounted for 82 percent of all global preservation requests.
Since Twitter started bringing out its transparency report in 2012, India has requested information on 11,667 user accounts, which is 10 percent of the global information requests.
The US submitted the most government information requests, accounting for 24 percent of the global volume, and 27 percent of the global accounts specified.
The second highest volume of requests originated from India, comprising 18 percent of global information requests and 30 percent of the global accounts specified.
Twitter said that it partially disclosed or did not disclose information in response to 64 percent of global government information requests, a decrease of 9 percent during this reporting period.
Japan, Brazil, and the US were the top three requesting countries when it comes to non-government requests, with all three accounting for 89 percent of all requests and 87 percent of the total accounts specified for this period.
In terms of legal demands from governments, in the six-month period, Twitter received 43,387 legal demands to remove content, specifying 196,878 accounts.
“This is the largest number of accounts ever subject to removal requests in a reporting period since releasing our first transparency report in 2012,” the company said late on Wednesday.
In the January-June period, Twitter required account holders to remove 4.7 million tweets that violated its rules.
Of the Tweets removed, 68 percent received fewer than 100 impressions prior to removal, with an additional 24 percent receiving between 100 and 1,000 impressions.
In these six months, Twitter permanently suspended 453,754 unique accounts for violations of its child sexual exploitation (CSE) policy.
In the first half of 2021, Twitter suspended 44,974 unique accounts for the promotion of terrorism and violent organizations.
According to Article 4(d) of India’s Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, Twitter is required to publish a monthly report regarding its handling of complaints from users in India, including action taken on them, as well as the number of URLs that Twitter has taken action as a result of proactive monitoring efforts.
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