Twitter Saw 237 Requests From Indian Government To Delete Accounts This Year

Dec. 14, 2018

According to Twitter’s 13th biannual Transparency Report, the company provided some information to the Indian government in 11 percent of cases.

“Twitter withheld two accounts and 23 Tweets in response to a legal demand from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) under Section 69A of the India Information Technology Act, 2000, for propagating objectionable content,” the company said in the report late Thursday.

When it comes to legal requests (including 9 requests in the form of court order) from India, 19 accounts and 498 Tweets were withheld as per the rules. In total, Twitter met the legal demands to withhold some content from India in 5 percent of the cases.

“Governments (including law enforcement agencies), organisations chartered to combat discrimination, and lawyers representing individuals are among the many complainants that submit legal requests,” said Twitter.

“The latest report shows that Twitter received approximately 80 per cent more global legal demands, impacting more than twice as many accounts compared to the previous reporting period.

“Similar to the last reporting period, roughly 87 per cent of the total global volume originated from only two countries: Russia and Turkey,” Twitter said.

For the first time, Twitter published metrics pertaining to its actions to fight spam and other malicious forms of automation.

“These report decreases indicate the effectiveness of our proprietary built technology in proactively identifying and challenging accounts at source and at scale,” said Twitter.

In the same period, Twitter suspended 487,363 accounts for violations related to child sexual exploitation.

Nearly 97 percent of these accounts were proactively flagged by a combination of technology, including PhotoDNA, and other purpose-built internal proprietary tools.

“The number of reports we received from governments of terrorist content decreased by 77 percent compared to the previous reporting period,” said Twitter.