Twitter released its government transparency report which was heavily redacted, but gave us a lot of insight to government requests across the world. The company saw a 40 percent increase in government requests over the past year. Technology companies like Twitter can disclose a number range of national security related requests, but Twitter is suing the government in order to limit the amount of demands for information requested by the U.S. Government.
The most interesting line in the redacted letter is: “These [redacted] requests affected a total of [redacted] users, out of approximately 240 million active user accounts. (That’s just [redacted] millionths of one percent of our users.)” This means Twitter could have only received 2 or 3 request this year, but then again a majority of users’ info is public.
Twitter was greeted with 1,622 information requests from the US government, 356 requests from Turkey, 288 request from Japan, and 116 from the United Kingdom. The company complied with 80 percent of the US governments request, while complying far less often from foreign countries.
If you want to explore how many requests were demanded, or what Twitter complied with- there is an interactive map that breaks it down extensively.
This report is a further step towards technology companies giving full transparency of government requests. Tell us in the comments below what you think about this report, and how transparent you think this is compared to previous versions.