Twitter has received thousands of content removal demands from several governments worldwide. The request recorded was from January to June 2021, and it is the highest number of removal demands to date.
The social media company revealed the requests in its latest transparency report.
Twitter's Content Removal Request
Twitter received 43,387 legal demands from a total of 196,878 accounts, according to Engadget.
The social media company said that the numbers represent the largest increase in content removal requests and accounts reported within a six-month reporting period from the time it began publishing transparency reports in 2012.
One factor that contributed to the increase in accounts reported was the legal demands submitted by the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology of Indonesia or IMCIT.
The IMCIT flagged a total of 102,363 accounts for posting sexual services and illegal adult content. The social media site took action on 18,570 of them.
Twitter also saw an increase in accounts withheld from the public because such posts violated Russia's laws against inciting violence and suicide.
In 2021, Russian News Agency Tass reported that the country's internet authorities threatened to block the social media site if it did not remove posts about violence, posts about suicide aimed at minors, child pornography, and posts about drug use.
The Russian authorities also slowed down the site's loading speeds for both the desktop version and mobile app.
A total of 95% of the total global number of legal demands came from 5 countries, with Japan being the top requester for content removal, according to Japan Times.
Japan has a total of 43% of the demands Twitter received, with most of them being about drugs, financial-related crimes, and obscenity. The other four countries are Turkey, India, Russia, and South Korea.
According to Twitter's report, there is an increase in the number of legal demands that Twitter gets, with a massive spike happening in the first six months of 2020.
It remains to be seen whether those numbers will continue to increase, but Sinead McSweeney, Twitter's VP of global public policy, expressed her concerns in a statement.
McSweeney said that the company is facing unprecedented challenges as governments worldwide are attempting to intervene and remove content from the platform.
McSweeney called it a threat to privacy and freedom of expression, and the company believes that this worrying trend needs their full attention.
Increasing Content Removal Demand
Several massive social media companies face scrutiny from governments and regulators worldwide over the material they allow on their platforms.
In 2021, Twitter faced high-profile tussles with governments from Nigeria and India over content moderation and regulation.
Aside from Twitter, companies like Google and Facebook have faced criticism in the United States and other countries over how it prevents misinformation and violent rhetoric on its platform.
The social media company said that 2021 was the year that they saw an increase in government demands around the world. They received demands to take down content that news outlets and journalists posted.
But Twitter said that the number of accounts subject to these requests decreased by 14% in their latest reporting period.
The report also said that requests from governments for Twitter to preserve account information decreased 4% from the past reporting period.
The United States alone accounted for 57% of the requests, and the United States was also the largest source of government information requests.
In 2021, Twitter struggled to remove misinformation regarding the COVID-19 vaccine.
Despite the struggle, Twitter said it is working on stopping the spread of misinformation on the platform.
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Written by Sophie Webster
