Evercore ISI Senior Managing Director Mark Mahaney discusses the future of Twitter after the departure of Jack Dorsey and the censorship questions facing new CEO Parag Agrawal.
The United States government issued more information requests to Twitter than any other country in the first half of 2021, according to the platform’s latest transparency report.
Except for the last reporting period in the second half of 2020, the US has submitted the largest volume of requests for information on Twitter since 2012.
US government information requests accounted for 24% of global information requests and 27% of global requests targeting specific accounts between January and June 2021, the transparency report released Tuesday said.
The Twitter website on a laptop. (AP Photo/John Raoux)
Those requests include “urgent and routine legal requests for account information issued by law enforcement and other government agencies,” according to Twitter.
“We’re facing unprecedented challenges as governments around the world increasingly try to step in and take down content,” Twitter’s vice president of public policy and global philanthropy, Sinead McSweeney, said in a statement Tuesday. “This threat to privacy and freedom of expression is a deeply troubling trend that requires our full attention.”
TWITTER SEES 26% INCREASE IN GOVERNMENT REQUESTS TO REMOVE CONTENT FROM JOURNALISTS
She added that Tuesday’s report highlights Twitter’s “longstanding commitment to meaningful transparency and the pressing and urgent need to protect the open, free, safe and global Internet.”
Officials from California, Virginia, West Virginia and New York submitted the most requests for information on Twitter.
The main agencies that requested information were the FBI, the Department of Justice and the US Secret Service. Those three agencies have made the most requests for information over the past six reporting periods, according to Twitter.
However, the US made only 45 legal requests for content removal in the first half of 2021 – a significant decrease compared to 298 legal requests for content removal in the first half of 2020.
The country with the second highest number of information requests in the first half of 2021 was India, which accounted for 18% of global requests and 30% of global specified accounts, followed by Japan and France.
Twitter permanently bans Khameini’s account that shared the video of TRUMP’s assassination
Twitter has received government requests for information from 99 different countries since 2012.
Globally, Twitter received more than 43,000 legal requests to remove content from nearly 197,000 accounts, representing “the largest number of accounts ever subject to takedown requests in a reporting period since our first report of transparency in 2012,” according to Twitter.
Japan, Russia, Turkey, India and South Korea were the main applicants.
The investigators targeted the accounts of more than 170 verified journalists on Twitter through 231 legal requests – a 14% increase compared to last year.
GET FOX BUSINESS IN ALBANIA by clicking HERE
“An open Internet that is global, available to all and built on open standards and the protection of human rights must be supported by meaningful transparency from both companies and governments,” the head of the Twitter Public Policy Lauren Culbertson. statement.
Culbertson said Tuesday’s updated report “includes data that shows governments around the world are increasingly putting pressure on online platforms to remove speech, a trend that requires our full attention and effort.”
