Centre asked Twitter for data on 2,200 accounts in 1st half of 2021

The Indian government asked Twitter for data on 2,200 user accounts in the January-June 2021 period and the micro-blogging platform complied with just 2 per cent of the requests.

There were also nearly 5,000 legal demands to remove Twitter accounts from India in the reporting period, the company's latest transparency report has revealed.

Global government preservation requests decreased by 4 per cent, while accounts specified increased by 24 per cent during this reporting period. The US (57 per cent) and India (25 per cent) together accounted for 82 per cent of all global preservation requests.

Since Twitter started bringing out its transparency report in 2012, India has requested information on 11,667 user accounts, which is 10 per cent of the global information requests.

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The US submitted the most government information requests, accounting for 24 per cent of the global volume, and 27 per cent of the global accounts specified.

The second highest volume of requests originated from India, comprising 18 per cent of global information requests and 30 per cent of the global accounts specified.

Twitter said that it partially disclosed or did not disclose information in response to 64 per cent of global government information requests, a decrease of 9 per cent during this reporting period.

Japan, Brazil, and the US were the top three requesting countries when it comes to non-government requests, with all three accounting for 89 per cent of all requests and 87 per cent of the total accounts specified for this period.

In terms of legal demands from governments, in the six-month period, Twitter received 43,387 legal demands to remove content, specifying 196,878 accounts.

"This is the largest number of accounts ever subject to removal requests in a reporting period since releasing our first transparency report in 2012," the company said late on Wednesday.

In the January-June period, Twitter required account holders to remove 4.7 million tweets that violated its rules.

Of the Tweets removed, 68 per cent received fewer than 100 impressions prior to removal, with an additional 24 per cent receiving between 100 and 1,000 impressions.

In these six months, Twitter permanently suspended 453,754 unique accounts for violations of its child sexual exploitation (CSE) policy.

In the first half of 2021, Twitter suspended 44,974 unique accounts for promotion of terrorism and violent organisations.

According to Article 4(d) of India's Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, Twitter is required to publish a monthly report regarding its handling of complaints from users in India, including action taken on them, as well as the number of URLs that Twitter has taken action as a result of proactive monitoring efforts.

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