Twitter is one of the most ‘open’ social media platforms we have today, which makes it more susceptible to privacy concerns than any of its competitors. This has kept the company’s privacy policy team busy, which comes up with means to achieve greater transparency time over time. One of the first companies in the industry to announce a transparency report in 2012, Twitter has launched a new Twitter Transparency Center to “make our transparency reporting more easily understood and accessible to the general public.”
This new portal is a brand new website that basically contains information about all of the company’s disclosed data, succinctly, in one place. The website, which is basically a redesign of the biannual Twitter Transparency Report site, will offer reports in Arabic, Turkish, Spanish, German, French, Japanese, and Portuguese very soon too.
According to the new center, which reflects data from the period July 1 to December 31, 2019, the company received 26.2k from governments around the globe. During the same period, it got 27.5k global legal demands to remove content. We should also mention that the center has this ‘outdated’ stats mostly because it has ran into delays with the COVID-19 pandemic in getting the new Twitter Transparency Center up and running.
The company took action on about 2.4 million accounts, suspending 872.9k of them. Moreover, it also removed 2.9 million content during this time period, most of it for hateful conduct.
Twitter also disclosed 83.6k accounts linked to state backed information operation. In June 2020 alone, the company published a dataset of 32,242 accounts attributed to state backed information operations originating from China, Russia and Turkey. “We believe Twitter has a responsibility to protect the integrity of the public conversation — including through the timely disclosure of information about attempts to manipulate Twitter to influence elections and other civic conversations by foreign or domestic state-backed entities,” the company said.
The company also made headway in its fight against scam content, and issued 88 million anti spam challenges in the 6 months ending in December 2019.
Overall, this new portal is supposed to provide greater transparency into Twitter’s actions, and so far, it looks like it’s doing a good job. “The public and policy makers want to be better informed about our actions and we recognize these calls for greater transparency,” the company said while announcing the center.
That is why the original report has evolved into a more comprehensive Twitter Transparency Center covering a broader array of our transparency efforts. This portal now includes sections covering information requests, removal requests, copyright notices, trademark notices, email security, Twitter Rules enforcement, platform manipulation, and state-backed information operations.
