Twitter Sees Jump In Government Demands To Remove Content of Reporters, News Outlets

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Twitter saw a surge in government demands worldwide in 2020 to take down content posted by journalists and news outlets, according to data released by the social media platform. 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% 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. 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 Dec. 31, and it produced some or all of the information in response to 30% of the requests. 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% from the first half of 2020, It complied with 29% 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% of the total global views in the second half of 2020, the first time the platform has released such data.

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