Social networking giant Twitter has been at loggerheads with the Indian government for quite a while now, be it over alleged toolkits, failure to take down anti-government posts, or non-compliance with the IT rules. And now, the latest in the long line of issues has Twitter Inc. claiming that the Central Government, along with all its agencies, became the single-largest information demanding entity on its platform, for the period between July to December, 2020.
This is the first time that the Indian government has made it to the top of a list which comes as a part of Twitter’s half-yearly transparency report. The report outlines how various governmental agencies have accounted for 25% of the overall account information demands put forward globally.
The social media platform says that India made a total 3,615 routine and emergency legal demands pertaining to account information, between the six month period from July to December 2020. Out of these, some 152 demands saw the government exercising its emergency control over such data, while the remaining 3,463 were of the routine nature. Out of these, only 0.7% of the emergency requests were complied with. On the other hand, the proportion was even less on routine requests, only 0.6% of which were complied to.
The second half-yearly report for 2020 puts the cap of the total account information requests made by the Indian government at 6,228. And Twitter apparently complied with just 0.8% of them, says the report. Government information requests cover both routine and emergency legal demands put forwards either by law enforcement or other agencies.
But the government isn’t the only entity that issued such requests to the social platform. A total of 6,971 legal demands were issued to the company from India, including government orders or otherwise. Out of these, 15 were court orders, while the remaining 6,956 were other legal demands. Out of these, 73.3% of the court orders were complied with, while 8.9% from the other legal demands were heeded.
World governments made up as many as 14,561 account information requests during the second half of last year. Of these, 2,542 were made by exercising emergency powers, while the remaining were routine orders.
Meanwhile, the transparency report also sheds light on the number of accounts that were withheld in India, which also saw an increase, and that, by more than three times, during the same period. As many as 60 accounts were withheld by the blue bird between July to December, while this number was only 17 during January to June. Also, 598 tweets were withheld, compared to the 377 during the first half of 2020.
