The last transparency report by Twitter shows that governments are asking for account data more than ever, Engadget reports.
The protection of users’ personal information is one of the main duties of social networks. However, in some cases, these social platforms have to cooperate with governments and give up user data. Twitter is now revealing growing demands from governments to access information from users, especially journalists.
Twitter says it saw “record highs” in government data requests from July to December 2021. During that time, Twitter received 47,572 lawful requests from 198,931 accounts.
The media and journalists are always a prime target for governments. According to Twitter’s 20th Transparency Report, requests for access to verified news outlets and journalist data have increased by 103% since the last report. Meanwhile, governments requested data from 349 accounts.
Twitter experiences ‘record high’ in number of government requests for account data
It shouldn’t be hard to guess which countries have received the most account data requests for media and journalists. According to the report, India with 114 applications, Turkey with 78 and Russia with 55 applications topped the list. Governments could also withhold 17 tweets.
Of course, the United States remains the largest requester of account data in the world. The United States now accounts for 20% of all account inquiries globally. Russia is also in second place with 18%. Requests for account data by Russia fell 20% over the six-month period.
Twitter says it has denied or limited requests for account data as much as possible. For example, the social network denied or restricted 31% of data requests in the United States and 60% of global requests. Relying on First Amendment rights, Twitter could stop 29 civil attempts to identify anonymous US users. Twitter has also pursued two such data request cases and may be successful in one so far.
It is evident that journalists have become a common target for governments and regimes around the world. Countries like India are the most demanding when it comes to blocking journalists’ accounts. Russia also cut off access to Twitter after its invasion of Ukraine. Other governments like Iran try to bribe content moderators to delete the opponent’s accounts.
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