Twitter broke the record for legal requests by governments to remove posts in the first half of 2021, when it received more than 43,000 requests related to nearly 200,000 user accounts.
The platform has published its latest transparency report, in which it collects the government requests received between January 1, 2021 and June 30 of the same year, as well as the application of its community policies.
Since these reports began to be published in 2012, the first half of 2021 was the period in which the most legal takedown requests from governments to Twitter were registered, with 43,387 requests on 196,878 accounts.
Of the total legal petitions, 95 percent came from just five countries: Japan, Russia, Turkey, India and South Korea. In 54 percent of cases, Twitter withheld the content or asked the authors to remove it.
Another of the data analyzed is the requests from governments to preserve account information. This figure decreased by 4 percent in the first half of 2021, with the United States as the main issuer of these applications (57 percent).
The United States was also the country responsible for the largest number of requests for information by the Government, with 3,026 requests representing 24 percent of the total volume. Twitter agreed to provide this data in 68 percent of cases.
APPLICATION OF ITS RULES
Twitter has also included in its report the application of its community rules, which have led it to require account owners to delete 4.7 million tweets that violated the rules.
Of the deleted tweets, 68 percent of them had fewer than 100 impressions before deletion, with an additional 24 percent receiving between 100 and 1,000 impressions. In total, these impressions accounted for less than 0.1 percent of the total for this period.
During the first half of 2021, Twitter permanently suspended 453,754 user accounts for violating its policies against the sexual exploitation of minors, of which 89 percent were proactively identified.
Another cause of removal was the promotion of terrorism and violent organizations, which led the platform to the suspension of 44,974 accounts, of which 93 percent were detected with proactive tools.
