More governments petitioned Twitter to take down various content posted by journalists and news outlets in 2020, data from the social network has revealed.
Twitter said in the report that they received 361 legal demands to take down content from 199 verified journalists and news outlets in the second half of 2020. This was a 26 percent increase from the first half of the year.
The transparency report released twice a year comes amid increased scrutiny of content allowed on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter by governments worldwide. The report details the enforcement of policy rules and the information and removal requests Twitter receives.
India overtook the United States to submit the highest number of removal requests followed by Turkey, Pakistan, and Russia. Previously, the platform did not follow up on such requests but with increased calls to curb misinformation, the company has moved to action the requests. The report shows that the company ultimately removed five tweets from journalists and news publishers.
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The report also showed that the company received 14,500 requests for information. Twitter submitted responses or information to 30 percent of the requests. This can be anything including unmasking the identities of people tweeting using pseudonyms.
There were 38,500 legal demands to take down various content, a nine percent decrease from the first half of 2020. The platform actioned 29 percent of the demands.
The report also showed that views of tweets that violated the company’s rules accounted for less than 0.1 percent of the total global views in the period.
Twitter said that it had taken a more proactive approach using technology to identify more than 65 percent of abusive content for human review instead of relying solely on users’ reports.
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