Indian govt asked Twitter for information on 474 accounts in first six months of 2019

The Indian government has asked Twitter to provide information about 474 accounts and requested to remove or withhold content of 504 accounts on violating the law of the land in the first six months of this year.

According to Twitter's latest transparency report, it helped the Indian government in 5 per cent of the information request cases and complied in 6 per cent of cases for account removal requests.

In total, 1,268 Twitter accounts were specified for information requests and 2,484 accounts for removal requests from India.

The information request "data includes the number of government requests received for account information, as well as the percentage of requests we complied with in whole or in part from India", said Twitter.

In case of account removal requests, "the data includes government requests (and other complaints of illegal content from authorized reporters) we've received to remove or withhold content on Twitter from India", the micro-blogging platform mentioned in its biannual report.

In the July-December 2018 period, the Indian government had made information requests for 422 Twitter accounts while law enforcement agencies asked the micro-blogging platform to remove 667 accounts for violating the law of the land.

Information requests from the US government continued to make up the highest percentage of legal requests for account information.

During the reporting period, 29 per cent of all global requests for account information originated within the US (2,120 demands for 4,150 accounts).

The social media platform said it received 7,300 demands for user data, up by 6 per cent a year earlier, but that the number of accounts affected are down by 25 per cent.

The company turned over some account data in just less than half of all cases.

"Compared to the previous reporting period, we received roughly 67 per cent more legal requests to remove content, originating from 49 different countries. Of the requests received, 80 per cent of the volume originated from Japan, Russia, and Turkey. We withheld content in a country 2,457 times, at either an account or Tweet level," informed Twitter.

A total of 115,861 accounts were suspended for violations related to the promotion of terrorism, down 30 per cent from the previous reporting period.

"Of those suspensions, 87 per cent consisted of accounts we proactively flagged using internal, proprietary removal tools," said Twitter.

The company saw a 48 per cent increase in accounts reported for potential violations of its private information policies.

"We suspended 119 per cent more accounts than the previous reporting period," it said.

In the case of impersonation, Twitter took enforcement action on 124,339 accounts for violating its impersonation policy.

"We saw a 22 per cent increase in accounts reported for potential violations of our abuse policies. We took action on 68 per cent more accounts compared to the last reporting period," it added.

More than 50 per cent of Tweets suspended for abuse are being proactively surfaced using technology, rather than relying on reports to Twitter, compared to 20 per cent a year ago.

"Additionally, due to a combination of our increased focus on proactively surfacing potentially violative content for human review and the inclusion of impersonation data for the first time, we saw a 105 per cent increase in accounts locked or suspended for violating the Twitter Rules," Twitter said.

There was a 48 per cent increase in accounts reported for potential violations of its hateful conduct policies.

During the reporting period, Twitter suspended a total of 244,188 accounts for violations related to child sexual exploitation.