Mediaboss Marketing

2012-07-03 12:41

San Francisco - Twitter said in its first "transparency report" that the number of government requests for user information or to block content is rising in 2012.

"We've received more government requests in the first half of 2012, as outlined in this initial dataset, than in the entirety of 2011," Twitter's legal policy manager Jeremy Kessel said in a blog post.

The overwhelming number of requests came from the US, accounting for 679 of the 849 requests for user information. In 75% of the US cases, Twitter gave some or all information.

The largest number of Twitter users are located in the US.

After the US was Japan with 98 cases and Britain and Canada with 11 each.

Copyright violations

"One of our goals is to grow Twitter in a way that makes us proud," Kessel said.

"This ideal informs many of our policies and guides us in making difficult decisions. One example is our longstanding policy to proactively notify users of requests for their account information unless we're prohibited by law."

Twitter said it received 3 378 "takedown" notices so far this year for copyright violations and removed 38% of the requested tweets.

Read more from the original source:
Twitter: Government censorship rising