Twitter Warns of 'Record Highs' In Account Data Requests

In Twitter's 20th transparency report, the company says it saw "record highs" in the number of account data requests during the July-December 2021 reporting period, with 47,572 legal demands on 198,931 accounts. Engadget reports: The media in particular faced much more pressure. Government demands for data from verified news outlets and journalists surged 103 percent compared to the last report, with 349 accounts under scrutiny. The largest slice of requests targeting the news industry came from India (114), followed by Turkey (78) and Russia (55). Governments succeeded in withholding 17 tweets. As in the past, US demands represented a disproportionately large chunk of the overall volume. The country accounted for 20 percent of all worldwide account info requests, and those requests covered 39 percent of all specified accounts. Russia is still the second-largest requester with 18 percent of volume, even if its demands dipped 20 percent during the six-month timeframe. The company said it was still denying or limiting access to info when possible. It denied 31 percent of US data requests, and either narrowed or shut down 60 percent of global demands. Twitter also opposed 29 civil attempts to identify anonymous US users, citing First Amendment reasons. It sued in two of those cases, and has so far had success with one of those suits. There hasn't been much success in reporting on national security-related requests in the US, however, and Twitter is still hoping to win an appeal that would let it share more details.

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