Twitter transparency report: Govts censor microbloggers too!

Following in the footsteps of Google, Twitter has also released its very own Transparency report. In a blogpost , Twitter said,

We were inspired by the great work done by our peers @Google, the primary goal of this report is to shed more light on:
• government requests received for user information,
• government requests received to withhold content, and
• DMCA takedown notices received from copyright holders.

The report also provides insight into whether or not we take action on these requests.

This the first transparency report by Twitter. Unlike the Google report which had detailed paragraphs about how each country was dealt with in relation to their censorship requests, the Twitter report just highlighted content removal requests.

[caption id=“attachment_365644” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“The Twitter Transparency Report table.”] [/caption]

Once again the US leads the censorship requests. Out of the 849 User information requests, 679 were from the US and in 75 percent of the cases Twitter did give out some or all of the required information. As far as copyright violations go, Twitter received 3,378 notices to take-down this content. The company said it complied with38 percent of the requested tweets.

Twitter’s very first report doesn’t reveal any significant trends as far as specific countries go but it does seem to confirm the idea that the US has been increasing requests for information on social media users in particulat.

Twitter’s report is a big step as far as online transparency goes however, and hopefully by next year’s report, the micro-blogging site will outline more details and specifics in its report.

According to Google’s report last month, the US government filed 6,321 requests with Google in the final six months of the 2011 alone. That was far more than any other country, according to Google, and a 6 percent increase from the previous six months. Google complied with 93 percent of the US requests for user data, encompassing more than 12,200 accounts.

India accounted for the second highest volume of user data requests with 2,207, a 27 percent increase from the previous six-month period. Google complied with two-thirds of India’s requests, which targeted more than 3,400 Google users.

With inputs from AP