Twitter reports record number of takedown requests from governments

In its latest transparency report, the website has revealed that it received the highest number of content removal demands from governments around the world from January to June 2021. It received over forty thousand legal demands that involve over twenty thousand accounts. The largest increase in content removal requests and accounts reported within a six-month reporting period from the time it started publishing transparency reports in 2012 is represented by those numbers.

The legal demands submitted by Indonesia's Ministry of Communication and Information Technology contributed to the spike in accounts reported. More than 100,000 accounts were flagged for posting sexual services and illegal adult content, and 18,570 of them were MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE MzE There was an increase in accounts that were not allowed to be used by the public due to content that violated Russia's laws against inciting suicide.

Russian News Agency Tass reported last year that the country's internet authorities threatened to block the social networking site if it didn't remove information about the use of drugs and child pornography. The authorities slowed down the loading speeds for desktop and mobile.

Japan was the top requester with 95 percent of the total global volume coming from five countries. Japan is responsible for 43 percent of the legal demands that were received, with most of them being about narcotics and drug-related posts, obscenity and financial-related crimes. Russia, Turkey, India, and South Korea are the other countries.

There is an upward trend in the number of legal demands Twitter gets, with a huge spike happening in the first half of 2020. It remains to be seen whether those numbers will keep on rising, but the VP of global public policy at Twitter expressed her concerns in a statement: "We're facing unprecedented challenges as governments around the world increasingly attempt to intervene and remove content." This threat to privacy and freedom of expression requires our full attention.