Policies/Regulation

The Indian government wants to know more about what you do on Twitter and its curiosity is only growing. The Centre’s requests from Twitter for user data has risen by over 100% in the last two years, as per the latest transparency report released by the social media major. Between January and June 2018, India sought information on 355 accounts, up from 261 and 139 in the first six months of 2017 and 2016.

However, Twitter provided information in the case of only 11% of the requests made by the government in the first six months of 2018. It got 246 requests for removal of accounts in this period and obliged to only about 5% of them. Twitter’s rate of acceptance of government requests has fallen sharply, from 31% in the first half of 2016, to 11% in the latest period.

Indian authorities (government, police, court orders) sought to remove 144 accounts in the second half of 2017, and 104 in the first half of that year. The data showed Twitter withheld (prevented access to) two accounts and 23 tweets in response to a legal demand from the IT ministry for propagating objectionable content.