India One Of The Most Active Nations To Ask Twitter To Remove Content, Request Access To User Data

Microblogging site Twitter on Wednesday (April 26) said that India was among the top four countries to send legal directions to Twitter to remove content and request user data between January 1 and June 30, 2022.

During this period, Twitter required users to remove 6,586,109 pieces of content that violated Twitter rules, a year-on-year increase of 29%. We took enforcement action on 5,096,272 accounts during this period (a 20% increase), and 1,618,855 accounts were suspended for violating the Twitter rules (up 28%).

“Around the world, Twitter received approximately 53,000 legal requests to remove content from governments during the reporting period. Twitter’s compliance rate for these requests varied by requester country. The top requesting countries were Japan, South Korea, Turkey and India,” the company said in a blog.

Moreover, Twitter received over 16,000 government information requests for user data from over 85 countries during the reporting period. The top five requesting countries seeking account information in the first half of 2022 were India, the United States, France, Japan, and Germany.

The report comes at a time when Twitter is embroiled in legal battles in India with the government over some of the content takedown orders issued by the Centre. While the social media platform contended in the Karnataka High Court that a majority of tweets that the government asked it to block were ‘innocuous’, the Centre last month said that Twitter didn’t appear before the review committee to challenge the content blocking orders and instead approached the court.

It is important to note that the data mentioned above is for the period when Elon Musk did not take over the platform. Earlier this month, Twitter CEO Elon Musk said that India’s social media laws are “quite strict” and he would prefer complying with the rules than see his employees going to jail.

“We cannot go beyond the laws of the country,” Musk said. “If the choice is between complying with laws or going to jail, I’d rather comply with laws than have any of my people go to jail.”

Recently, the Centre notified multiple amendments to the IT Rules, 2021, that empower the government to flag and identify the spread of misleading information about it.

Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said that a new entity will be notified to fact-check all online content related to the government.

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