Twitter increases scope of its transparency reports as governments keep

It complied with none of these requests.

More countries continue to request user information from Twitter, with the vast majority of requests coming from the United States.

Users are notified of the requests for their account information and can challenge the request, unless the request falls into one of the exceptions under Twitter’s user notice policy, such as an emergency or a request involving a compromised account. A request for information generally relates to criminal investigations. The data now includes details from January 1, 2015 to June 30, 2015. A court in Turkey blocked in April access to a number of sites, including Twitter and YouTube, as these were used to spread an image of an Istanbul prosecutor held by terrorists at gunpoint.

Following several redesigns the company has made over the last year, Twitter also released a new design for its transparency report, which now appears more as an online portal for the different types of requests.

Overall, for the first half of this year, Twitter received 4,363 information requests for 12,711 accounts and the company provided some information in 58% of the cases. It added that this is the largest increase in requests and affected accounts between reporting periods since it began publishing the Transparency Report in 2012. It’s also worth noting that India’s requests increased 175 percent over the last period to 113 requests, 19 percent of which produced some information. “Japan, ever present in the list of top requesters, surpassed Turkey as our second largest requester by just two percent”.

It goes down sharply from there: Japan made 425 requests, for 10%, while Turkey had 412, for 9%, and the United Kingdom had 299, for 7% of all requests. The most important bump was from the USA authorities, with requests up by 50.2 %, from 1,622 to 2,436.

Removal requests: A total of 442 court ordered removal requests were received by Twitter and 561 from various government agencies, police etc. Of this, Twitter withheld 42% of the content, a total of 2,354 tweets and 158 accounts. In Turkey from January to June, Twitter withheld 1,667 tweets from 125 accounts. That marks a 26 percent increase from the previous six-month period.

Twitter still receives a lot less user data requests from governments compared to Google and Facebook, both receive hundreds of thousands of requests every few months.

For Twitter the report said that it had received 14,694 takedown notices affecting 22,880 accounts. The number of accounts impacted also went up by 11 percent.