In a new report, Twitter has accused global governments of asking the San-Francisco-based social media company to snoop on private details of user accounts at an alarming rate.
The tech titan revealed that it fielded nearly 60,000 legal demands during a six-month period last year asking the company to remove content.
Yoel Roth, the head of Twitter’s safety and integrity, said in a conversation broadcast on the site, ”We’re seeing governments become more aggressive in how they try to use legal tactics to unmask the people using our service, collect information about account owners and also using legal demands as a way to try and silence people.”
Accounting for 20 per cent of the requests, the United States makes up the majority of demands for account information as per the company.
Making the most requests of Twitter to take down content from accounts, Japan is also a frequent requestor for account information.
During the last half of 2021, Twitter reported a huge spike in requests from governments that targeted verified journalists and news outlets.
Indicating a 103 per cent increase, governments also made a record number of legal demands on 349 accounts of verified journalists or news outlets around the globe between July and December of last year.
Complying fully with roughly 40 per cent of all asks for information on user accounts, Twitter did not provide a breakdown of which countries made those requests on journalists’ accounts.
Twitter is not the only social media platform that faced this issue. Previously, Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms had also reported an increase in government asks for private user data during the same timeframe.
(With inputs from agencies)
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