Twitter's bi-annual transparency report has been updated to reflect the first six months of 2013, and to nobody's surprise, worldwide government requests for account information and content removal have increased.Year-over-year, account information requests from governments increased by 36 percent, from 849 worldwide in the first six months of 2012 to 1,157 in the same period this year. In total, the requests in the first half of 2013 specified 1,697 user accounts. Twitter, which says in the report that it only complies when legally required to, complied with 55 percent of requests.
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Perhaps more concerning than information requests are requests for Twitter to remove content from the site. In the first half of last year, Twitter received only six removal requests. In the same period in 2013, that number jumped to 60, as more countries ask Twitter to remove defamatory content, hate speech, and the like. Brazil led the way with a total of 39 tweets withheld, while none were removed as a result of the US government's two requests."Over the last six months, we have gone from withholding content in two countries to withholding content (ranging from hate speech to defamation) in seven countries," Twitter legal policy manager Jeremy Kessel told Reuters.The overall growth of government requests to Twitter is partly due to user growth globally. Outside of the US, growth in requests is also surely due to awareness—once governments figure out how they can request data and takedowns from Twitter, they're likely to do so.But the US remains at the top of the pack, and while public social media being used in criminal proceedings may not seem like a massive concern—people shouldn't post illegal shit on Twitter, right?—it does become more worrisome when you consider that Twitter also receives secret requests that it legally can't disclose.Notably, Twitter was not implicated in the PRISM scandal, which suggests the company refused to comply with the NSA on that program. However, the Patriot Act and FAA 702 do allow the government avenues for secret court-ordered data collection, and tech companies forced to comply are not allowed to make this information public.It's not year clear if Twitter has had such requests, but other major tech companies, email providers, and social media firms have. Combine that secrecy with the amount of growth of public requests—as well as the FBI and Justice Department's increasing focus on data mining—and it seems reasonable to assume that the government's growing reliance on data requests carries over into the secret courts as well.@derektmead