14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter has disclosed its fifth Transparency Report today, trying to let its users know just how much the world’s governments want their data. According to the company, requests for user information have grown by 46 percent.
The new report, Twitter says, shows a steady increase in global requests for account information, content removal and copyright takedowns. 2,068 requests were received by Twitter between January and June this year from 54 countries, out of which eight had not previously submitted any requests.
There have also been 432 requests for content removal from 31 countries and 9,199 copyright takedown requests for both Twitter and Vine.
This time, the report tries to offer more depth, so Twitter has added two new features to the report on the United States. The first is a breakdown in requests by US state and the second is a list of the countries that have submitted mutual legal assistance treaty requests through the DOJ.
Unsurprisingly, the most requests received by Twitter have come from the United States, where the number reached 1257. Twitter has provided some sort of data for 72 percent of these.
“Despite our global growth, the United States continues to make the majority of requests for account information, comprising 61% of all requests received (up 2% from last report). Of the remaining 39%, Japan remains the next largest requester, constituting ~9% of overall requests (down from 15% during the second half of 2013). Excluding the twelve countries that submitted emergency disclosure requests only, Brazil and the United Kingdom each comprised ~4% of worldwide requests,” reads Twitter’s report.
When it comes to content removal requests, things are getting interesting. In the past months, we’ve all noticed that there has been an increased activity in content removal or blocking due to requests from several countries, more specifically Turkey and Russia.
Twitter’s transparency report confirms it. In the first six months of the year, Turkey’s courts issued 65 orders asking for content to be taken down, while the governmental agencies made another 121 requests, affecting 304 accounts. The social network said yes to 30 percent of these requests, blocking 17 accounts and 183 tweets.
On Russia’s part, Twitter received only orders from government agencies, namely 32 of them, affecting 34 accounts. The company complied with 59 percent of these.
France’s officials have also been busy, issuing 107 requests to remove content belonging to 112 accounts. Twitter only said “yes” to 28 percent of the cases, summing up to 30 tweets. Most of them were associated with illegal discrimination.
As for DMCA notices, Twitter received 9,199 requests in the first six months, removing material in 76 percent of the cases. This translates into 30,870 tweets and 15,088 media files from 9,069 accounts.
As you may remember, tech companies are allowed to provide information about the secret government requests they receive, but only if they do so in batches of 1,000. This makes things incredibly difficult because, for a company such as Twitter, which doesn’t get that many requests, they’d have to always report, for instance, between 0 and 999 FISA demands, regardless if there are only 2 demands or if there are 998 of them.
Twitter has tried to convince the government to allow even more transparency and to provide more accurate numbers, but they haven’t managed to make any headway.
“Therefore, we are weighing our legal options to provide more transparency to our users. While we are heartened by the latest version of the USA FREEDOM Act of 2014, as recently introduced by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT), which would reform certain aspects of government surveillance and allow Twitter to provide more meaningful transparency to its users, we remain disappointed with the DOJ’s inaction,” Twitter said.
