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Tech

Government Requests for Twitter User Data Continue to Skyrocket

The United States, by far, is the biggest offender.

​Worldwide requests from governments to censor tweets or to gain access to user information continue to skyrocket, ​according to a new report from Twitter.

Between July and December 2014, Twitter received 2871 requests for user account information, an increase of 40 percent over the previous six months. Takedown requests increased 84 percent, from 433 to 796.

In the United States, Twitter received 32 overall requests from local and federal governments and courts. It removed no content. It did, however, receive 1,622 requests for user account information, covering a total of 3,299 accounts, and gave up at least some information 80 percent of the time.

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The United States dwarfs all other countries in overall information requests (it accounts for 56 percent of all requests), and Twitter complies with the US government much more often than it does with other countries. Turkey, for instance, requested user information 356 times, and Twitter didn't comply even once. It also rejected all of Russia's 108 complaints.

Twitter is currently involved in an ongoing legal battle with the US government to allow it to release more specifics about requests for user account information it receives.

Of the major social media networks, Twitter is probably the most transparent—the company posts all of its takedown requests on a site known as Chilling Effects, so legal analysts and civil liberty types can analyze what methods governments are using to try to censor speech. But Twitter's transparency report does has problems: As we've noted before, governments and social media sometimes partner to remove content in ways that aren't specifically noted in the report.

Last year, Twitter removed a series of tweets and temporarily banned a popular Turkish Twitter account that is often critical of the government. The reasoning, here, was that the account was using an unauthorized photo as its avatar, which is against Twitter's terms of service. Twitter removed the tweets, which showed up nowhere on its transparency report.

These so-called terms of service violations are a relatively new censorship tactic that governments are trying out. Because Twitter (and, to a lesser extent, Facebook) have pushed back against court orders, watchdogs within the government instead try to get content removed that they think violates a social media company's own rules.

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"A lot of the transparency reports don't really matter at all, because both Twitter and Facebook are perfectly willing to take phone calls from government officials who are looking for content that are against their terms and services," Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me. "If we're talking about a terms of service violation, there's no transparency at all. It's really insidious, obviously."

York has started a project to detail all takedowns, not just government-ordered ones.

Since Twitter began reporting data in mid-2012, the number of government requests for information and for censorship has gone up every six months without fail. Twitter says that part of that trend is due to Twitter's international expansion and increasing popularity around the world. It notes, however, that in the last six months there were specific events that had many requests associated with it.

"There were also several world events during this time period, including various elections and terrorist attacks, which led to an increase in requests," the company wrote.

That may be a fair point, but if we're expecting "world events" to stop happening in order to reverse this trend, I suspect we may be disappointed.