KARACHI: According to the semi-annual Transparency Report, the micro-blogging website Twitter has started processing requests from Pakistan to destroy content, which did not happen last year.
This is the first time the company has issued a full compliance rate that reflects the rate of requests that Twitter took to remove content (such as tweet or account removal, tweet deletion or account suspension) in response to legal requirements.
The company has released its latest transparency report for July-December 2019 with Twitter’s Comprehensive Transparency Center, Dawn reportedDawn reported.
The new platform provides one-stop access to all disclosed data, a model of national comparisons and tool tips for in-depth explanations of key terms used by the platform and Twitter from July 2018 to December 2019. Provides metrics and procedures for enforced rules.
Between July and December 2019, Twitter received 219 legal requests to remove content from Pakistan.
According to Twitter, the legal demands included court orders and other formal demands for the removal of material by lawyers representing government agencies and individuals.
No legal request was made to remove the content by a court order between July and December 2019, but Twitter said it complied with a 35.2% compliance rate during that period.
Of those, 1,476 were legal requests to suspend accounts, but Twitter did not stop the tweet or account. However, the company said it had removed some content or accounts on 191 legal claims for violating Twitter’s terms and conditions.
According to the requests information, Pakistan identified 13 accounts and 18 in the second half of 2019, while last year there were 23 requests for information and 70 accounts were identified.
Twitter’s Transparency Report added that out of 13 information requests, Pakistan made 8 routine requests while 5 were emergency requests. Similarly, out of 18 accounts identified, 10 were routine requests and 8 were emergency requests from the government.
Global initiatives
Governments and law enforcement agencies around the world submitted about 21 percent more information requests than ever before, Twitter said.
In particular, the number of requests for identification of accounts increased by about 63%.
The United States is the largest source of government requests, but accounts for only 26 percent of the world’s volume and 44 percent of account identification.
The second highest number of requests came from Japan, accounting for 22% of global information requests and about 14% of account identification.