PremiumIndia is the single largest source of government information requests on Twitter, the platform said in a blog post announcing its global Transparency Report today. Twitter’s Transparency Report includes information on information requests, legal demands for content takedowns and more.
India accounted for 25% of the global volume of requests and 15% of the global accounts involved, during the July-December 2020 period. Information requests are a combination of routine requests from government agencies and emergency requests.
The country had submitted 2983 information requests to Twitter during the January-June period, of which 2,637 were routine requests and 246 were emergency requests. This accounted for about 23% of the total government information requests received globally. In the July-December period, the numbers grew to 3615 total requests, with 3463 routine requests and 152 emergency requests. The total number of information requests worldwide were 12,657 and 14561, respectively, during the Jan-Jun and July-December period.
The United States came in at number two at 22%, though the country submitted the highest number of emergency requests in the world.
Further, Twitter said it received 38,524 legal demands for content removal during the July-December period, which specified 131,933 accounts. “We withheld or otherwise removed some or all of the reported content in response to 29% of these global legal demands, 11091 total," the company said in its blog post.
94% of the global volume of legal demands came from five countries — India, Japan, Russia, Turkey and South Korea. Twitter also said that accounts of 199 verified journalists and news outlets from around the world were subject to 361 legal demands, which is a 26% increase from the Jan-Jun period. The company noted that while the total number of legal demands dropped by 9% compared to the last reporting period, the requests received during July-December sought content removal from “the largest number of accounts ever in a single reporting period".
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