India was one of many prime international locations to legally search the elimination of content material from Twitter within the first half of 2022.
“Around the globe, Twitter acquired approximately 53,000 authorized requests to take away content material from governments throughout the reporting interval,” the microblogging website said on April 25. It additionally eliminated 6,586,109 posts that violated its guidelines; this was practically 30% greater than within the July-December 2021 interval.
In addition to India, the international locations that sought consumer account info have been the US, France, Japan, and Germany.
India additionally issued 3,992 authorized calls for to take away content material from Twitter, together with 114 accounts of verified journalists and information shops throughout the second half of 2021.
In latest months, Twitter has been accused of acquiescing to the Indian authorities’s stance by blocking the accounts of outstanding journalists, politicians, and activists. Prime minister Narendra Modi’s authorities has allegedly tried to stifle free speech within the nation. Twitter CEO Elon Musk admitted to the BBC earlier this month that India had “extraordinarily strict” social media guidelines.
India’s calls for for Twitter censorship have solely risen
Within the three years since 2019, India has requested consumer info of 11,877 accounts. Between 2014, when prime minister Modi first got here to energy, and 2019 when he was re-elected, India made just one,389 such requests.
In the meantime, some 97% of the whole international quantity of such calls for since 2019 originated from Japan, Russia, South Korea, Turkey, and India.
Of those, most have been requests to take away tweets by verified handles of journalists and information shops and have been filed within the July-December 2021 interval. They accounted for 19% of all requests, Twitter’s 20th Transparency Report said.