Twitter often releases it’s government transparency report and this time round there has been a 40 % worldwide increase in government information requests with requests from two new countries in Africa. The Kenyan and Egyptian governments have also joined the list of nations that secretly requested Twitter for information on Twitter users in their countries. The major reasons why countries ask for this information is for mainly for national intelligence. Today, Twitter has published a heavily redacted two-page filing that outlines some interesting numbers worldwide.
These requests approximately affected 240 million active user accounts
Most governments have discovered that Twitter is a great source of secret information and have year on year requested the social media company for this data. Twitter says “These [redacted] requests affected a total of [redacted] users, out of approximately 240 million active user accounts. (That’s just [redacted] millionths of one percent of our users.)”
During this reporting period (Jul-Dec 2014), Twitter received an 84 percent increase in global government and government-sanctioned demands to remove content from Twitter. The top three requesting countries included: Turkey (477 requests), Russia (91), and Germany (43). According to Twitter’s report Kenya and Egypt both had only one Government request.
Outside intelligence agencies, Twitter saw 1,622 information requests from the US government, covering 3,299 accounts; it complied with 80 percent of them. Turkey (356 requests), Japan (288), and the United Kingdom (116) followed it, although a far smaller portion of those were granted. You can view Twitter’s as an interactive map on Twitter’s site.
Source: Twitter
