21% increase in account information requests from govts: Twitter

US civil requests for account information that sought to unmask the identities of anonymous speakers on first amendment grounds during this reporting period.

"We ended up litigating six of these requests. Twitter prevailed in four cases, lost one, and one is still pending. No information was produced in response to the other 17 requests".

In this reporting period, Twitter received 27,538 legal demands to remove content specifying 98,595 accounts.

This is the largest number of requests and specified accounts it received since releasing its first Transparency Report in 2012.

"This record number of legal demands originated from 51 different countries. 86 per cent of the total global volume of legal demands originated from only three countries: Japan, Russia, and Turkey," Twitter said.

The new Twitter Transparency Centre offers all disclosed data in one place and data visualizations, making it easier to compare trends over time.

The Twitter archive of state-backed information operations is being used by researchers, journalists and experts around the world which now spans more than 9 terabytes of media, includes over 83,000 accounts, and over 200 million Tweets and is an industry-first resource.

Twitter said it removed 86,799 unique accounts for promoting terrorism and violent extremism in the reporting period. Nearly 74 per cent of the unique accounts were proactively suspended using its internal, proprietary tools.

There were 257,768 unique accounts suspended during this reporting period for violating Twitter policies prohibiting child sexual exploitation.

"Hateful conduct expanded to include a new dehumanization policy on July 9, 2019. There was a 54 per cent increase in the number of accounts actioned for violations of our hateful conduct policy during this reporting period," Twitter informed.

( With inputs from IANS )