Twitter sees surge in government demands to remove content of reporters, with India submitting the most requests
- Twitter said legal demands to remove content of journalists and news outlets were up 26 per cent in the second half of 2020
- India, Turkey, Pakistan and Russia had the most removal requests, and India topped the US in information requests for the first time
In its transparency report published on Wednesday, Twitter said verified accounts of 199 journalists and news outlets on its platform faced 361 legal demands from governments to remove content in the second half of 2020, up 26 per cent from the first half of the year.
Twitter ultimately removed five tweets from journalists and news publishers, the report said. India submitted most of the removal requests, followed by Turkey, Pakistan and Russia.
The social media platform did not previously track such data on requests pertaining to journalists or publishers.
India topped the list for information requests by governments in the second half of 2020, overtaking the United States for the first time, the report said.
The company said globally it received over 14,500 requests for information from July 1 to December 31, and it produced some or all of the information in response to 30 per cent of the requests.
02:33
How China censors the internet
Such requests can include governments or other entities asking for the identities of people tweeting under pseudonyms.
Twitter also received more than 38,500 legal demands to take down various content, down 9 per cent from the first half of 2020. It complied with 29 per cent of the demands.
In the updated transparency report, Twitter said the number of impressions, or views of a tweet, that violated Twitter’s rules accounted for less than 0.1 per cent of the total global views in the second half of 2020, the first time the platform has released such data.
The company said its technology is proactively identifying more than 65 per cent of abusive content for human review, rather than relying on reports submitted by Twitter users.
Like other social media companies, Twitter has struggled to police hate speech, misinformation and other abuses on its service. Chief Executive Jack Dorsey was among the tech leaders who testified before Congress in March on misinformation.
Major social media companies were under fire this week over racist abuse on their platforms directed at Black players on the England soccer team.