Twitter Transparency Report, US Tops the list
Twitter yesterday has released the company's first transparency report which offers information about user information, removal and takedown notice requests Twitter received in the first half of 2012. The idea for the creation of the report came from Google which published a transparency report of its own earlier this year.
The three tables that Twitter published reveal information about government requests for user information or to withhold contents, and DCMA takedown notices that were received from copyright holders. As far as governmental requests grow, Jeremy Kessel on behalf of Twitter mentioned that the company did receive more governmental requests in the first half of 2012, than it received in the entire 2011 year.
When you look at the user information request table you will notice that there are only four countries in the list that have submitted more than ten requests. The list is topped by the United States with 679 requests, putting the second placed Japan with its 98 requests n place. Both Canada and the UK share the third place with 11 requests each.
The table highlights the percentages where some or all information where produced (75% for US requests, again topping the list), and the number of users or accounts that were specified in all requests. The total number of requests seems low, with 849 requests for 1181 user accounts in the first half of 2012.
Only six removal requests have been submitted to Twitter either by court orders or government agencies, with not one of them having resulted in the removal of some or all of the content that was requested to be removed.
The third table lists copyright takedown notices, and things get more active here. Twitter received a total of 3376 copyright takedown notices in the first half of 2012 that affected 5874 user accounts and 5275 tweets. A third of the notices have led to the removal of information on Twitter.
It is rather interesting to note that Twitter is not receiving as many requests in a six month period than Google is receiving on a single day as far as DCMA copyright notices are concerned. Twitter announced that it will update the report twice a year.
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