Twitter's first transparency report for 2014 reveals the largest number of U.S. government data requests to date, with a total of 1,257 requests. Japan was next on the list, making 9 percent of the requests, down from 15 percent in the last report.
The U.S. figure represents a 46 percent jump over the last report, and an increase of 80 percent over the same period last year.
The total number of requests made this year was 2,058, and 54 countries requested information.
Saudi Arabia made the third most requests with 189 in total. Twitter claims just around 1 percent of the requests made were met with information being produced.
Twitter said its draft transparency report was sent to the Department of Justice in April to determine if information in the report was classified and could not be published. Twitter did not receive a reply within the 90 day period it was seeking, and published the report without input from the agency.
"Specifically, if the government will not allow us to publish the actual number of requests, we want the freedom to provide that information in much smaller ranges that will be more meaningful to Twitter's users, and more in line with the relatively small number of nonnational security information requests we receive," said Jeremy Kessel, a senior manager for Twitters Global Legal Policy, in a blog post.
Twitter also revealed that a number of new countries had asked for information regarding certain users. These countries included Albania, Bahrain, Chile, Eqypt, Lithuania, and Thailand.
Twitter is not the only company to be receiving government requests. A number of companies that operate social media platforms or mailing services are walking a fine line between cooperating with the government and keeping users happy. Most of these companies are turning toward sticking with their user base. In fact, Microsoft recently announced that it would battle the government in court over the issue.
Twitter also revealed how many of these requests were emergency requests, showing that of the 1,257 requests related to U.S. users, only 132 of them were emergency-related. This report also showed that Twitter produced information for 72 percent of the total requests made.
