These 5 Countries Are Diligently Asking Twitter To Remove Disturbing Content During 2021

JAKARTA - Social media has become a hotbed of fake news or hoaxes, and content that violates their rules. Twitter, for example, has seen a record number of requests for removal of content increase in the past year.

These requests usually come from governments in various countries on Twitter's marketplace list, and this is actually quite common.

According to last year's first-half transparency report, Twitter detailed some statistics on takedown requests. Governments around the world requested to remove content from a record number of accounts between January and June 2021, with 43,387 legal requests to remove content from 196,878 accounts issued over a six-month period.

This is the largest number of accounts targeted by government removal requests since Twitter began releasing transparency reports in 2012.

As many as 95 percent of the demands only came from five countries, namely Japan, Russia, Turkey, India and South Korea. In response to 54 percent of these demands, Twitter blocked content in some countries or asked users to remove it.

"We are facing an unprecedented challenge as governments around the world increasingly seek to intervene and remove content. This threat to privacy and freedom of expression is a very worrying trend that requires our full attention," said vice president of global public policy and philanthropy. Twitter Sinead McSweeney, as quoted from Neowin, Wednesday, January 26.

"Today's update to Twitter's Transparency Center highlights our longstanding commitment to meaningful transparency and the pressing need to maintain a free, secure and global Open Internet."

It is important to note that the scale of increase in removal requests by the government only exists during the period January to June 2021 compared to others.

There was a 50 percent increase in the number of accounts reported compared to the previous six months, with legal requests to remove content also jumping 14 percent compared to the previous reporting period.

Meanwhile, requests for account deletion belonging to journalists and news outlets fell 14 percent. Even so, Twitter did not explain in its blog post what global factors were causing lawsuits for the takedown to increase.