India single largest source of government requesting information, says Twitter

India is the single largest source of government information requests during the second half of 2020, accounting for 25 per cent of the global volume, as per the Twitter Transparency Report released on Wednesday.

India accounted for 25 per cent of the global volume of requests and 15 per cent of the global accounts involved, during the July-December 2020 period.

During this period, Twitter received 38,524 legal demands to remove content specifying 131,933 accounts. Responding to these demands, Twitter withheld or otherwise removed some or all of the reported content in response to 29 per cent of these global legal demands.

“Over the past year, we have experienced and continue to navigate severe global challenges, including the coronavirus pandemic. We have also seen concerted attempts by governments to limit access to the Internet generally and to Twitter specifically,” the company said in a blog.

For the June-December period, the compliance rate for government information requests was 30 per cent globally. The second highest volume of information requests originated from the United States, comprising 22 per cent of global information requests.

The United States submitted the highest volume of global emergency requests (34 per cent), followed by Japan (17 per cent), and South Korea (16 per cent).