By Regina Elaine Vendivil

Twitter Inc. saw a jump in the demands from the government authorities worldwide last year, 2020, to remove content published by reporters, journalists, and news outlets, according to data released by the said social media platform yesterday, 14th of July 2021. 

It has been disclosed in a transparency report by Twitter that governments from different countries have filed 361 legal demands to remove content against verified accounts of 199 journalists and news publishers during the second half of 2020, which were up by 26% from the first half. 

India was reported to have submitted the most removal requests with 128 requests, which overtook the United States for the first time. This is followed by countries such as Turkey (108 requests), Pakistan (52 requests), and Russia (28 requests). 

Twitter has ultimately put down five tweets from the news media. However, the social media platform did not previously track the data on requests which concern the mentioned news outlets and journalists. 

From July 1 to December 31 last year, the company has received a total of over 14,500 requests coming from governments and other entities asking for the identities of the people behind a tweet, and 38,500 legal demands to remove various content. 

Twitter also mentioned that they have been identifying more than 65% of abusive content for human review, instead of relying mainly on the reports they receive from Twitter users around the world. 

Similar to the reports collected by other social media companies, Twitter has struggled most to police hate speech, misinformation, and other abuses on its service.

References:

Reuters. (2021b, July 15). Twitter sees jump in gov’t demands to remove content of reporters, news outlets. Rappler. Retrieved from https://www.rappler.com/technology/social-media/twitter-jump-govt-demands-remove-content-reporters-transparency-report-2020-h2

Vakil, C. (2021, July 14). Twitter seeing more government requests to remove journalists’ content: report. The Hill. Retrieved from https://thehill.com/policy/technology/563019-twitter-seeing-more-government-requests-to-remove-journalists-content 

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