In a biannual transparency report published on Wednesday, Social media giant, Twitter, revealed that the second half of 2020 was marked by a surge in government demands to delete information shared by reporters and news publishers.
India issued 128 removal requests during the second half of last year, the most among countries. India was followed by Turkey (108), Pakistan (52), and Russia (28). Twitter is currently in a court proceeding against the Indian government after the microblogging site lost immunity over user-generated content.
“199 accounts of verified journalists and news outlets from around the world were subject to 361 legal demands” to remove content—a 26% increase from the first half of the year.
According to Twitter’s report, the platform took down five tweets from verified journalists and news outlets. Of those, four tweets were “withheld” in Brazil and one in France.
Twitter no more enjoys liability protection against user-generated content in India as they failed to comply with new IT rules, the Indian government claimed in their affidavit in court.
The report noted that “Twitter also received an increase of legal demands including accounts from verified journalists and news outlets from a wider range of jurisdictions, such as Brazil (16), Mexico (9), Thailand (9), Ireland (3), France, (2), Colombia (2), and Venezuela (2).”
