January 26, 2022

Twitter has received a record number of requests, mostly from governments, to remove content posted on its platform.

According to Twitter, governments made 43,387 legal requests to remove content from 196,878 accounts in a six-month period.

The social media giant said this was the largest number of accounts being impacted by government removal requests in a reporting period since the tech giant began publishing transparency reports a decade ago.

Ninety-five percent of these legal demands came from just five countries – Japan, followed by Russia, Turkey, India, and South Korea.

Twitter said it either “withheld” access to content in some countries or required account holders to delete some or all of the reported content in response to 54% of global legal demands.

The data also showed that the number of accounts identified in the legal requests increased by almost 50% from 131,933 accounts in the previous six months, and the number of government deletion requests rose by 14% from 38,524 in the last reporting period, up 2.8% from the previous year, Twitter said.

For more information, read the original story in Reuters.