Turkish man uses his phone in the Eminonu district of Istanbul. AFP PHOTO / OZAN KOSE
Twitter’s transparency report for the first half of 2015 shows a significant jump in the number of removal requests and overall account data requests by country. The company says it has received 26% more removal requests, impacting 11% more accounts, since the period of the second half of 2014. Overall, requests for account information increased 52% — the largest jump the company has seen since the inception of its transparency reporting. Turkey and Russia represented the majority of the removal requests, except Turkey was leaps ahead with 718 and Russia 68. Twitter says the collective requests processes resulted in the withholding of 147 accounts and 1,723 tweets for those two countries.
Overall, for the first half of 2015, 158 accounts and 2,354 tweets were withheld on a global scale, but Turkey’s massive share of this content removal is glaring. Turkey made 328 court-ordered removal requests and 149 government- or police-requested ones in the second half of 2014. Those figures soared to 408 and 310 respectively this year. The company says it filed legal objections with Turkish courts in response to 60% of Turkish orders received, and its objections prevailed 5% of the time. (For comparison, in the second half of 2014, India made one court-ordered removal request to Twitter, and 14 removal requests that came from government agencies or police. The U.S. made 6 court-ordered removal requests, and 26 from government. In the first half of 2015, India made two court-ordered requests, 31 government-based ones, while the U.S. made zero court-ordered requests, and 25 government-based ones.)
While Twitter pales in its number of users in comparison to Facebook (the former has about 316 million monthly active users, while the latter 1.49 billion), the difference between the number of account data requests the two receive is noteworthy: India made 5,473 requests for account data from Facebook in the second half of 2014, second only to the U.S., which made 14,274 requests in the same period. Turkey filed 165 content requests, and 278 user account requests.
On Twitter’s end, in the first half of this year, India filed 113 account information requests, the U.S. 2,436, and Turkey 412. These figures are up from 41, 1,622, and 356 respectively from the previous reporting period.
Turkey’s heightened level of aggression towards U.S.-based social media companies — in this case, Twitter more so than Facebook — is indicative of a few, somewhat obvious trends. Already on full alert due to the roiling battle in near-by Syria against the Islamic State, Ankara is also struggling to contain increasingly vocal Kurdish factions at home. Given Twitter’s expansive role in the Arab Spring, little wonder that Turkey is keeping a close eye on the social platform.
Even though removal requests and account data requests are different, the rise in both points to increasing wariness of U.S.-based social companies. Thanks go to Edward Snowden on this count.
