According to data released by Twitter, the social media platform saw a surge in government demands worldwide in 2020 to take down content posted by journalists and news outlets.
Twitter reported that 199 verified accounts of journalists and news outlets on its platform faced 361 legal demands from governments to remove content in the second half of 2020, an increase of 26% from the first half of the year.
India submitted most of the removal requests, followed by Turkey, Pakistan, and Russia. India topped the list for information requests by governments in the second half of 2020, overtaking the United States for the first time.
Twitter said it globally received over 14,500 requests for information from July 1 to December 31 2020, and it produced some or all of the information in response to around 30% of the requests.
Twitter also received more than 38,500 legal demands to remove various content, a decrease of 9% from the first half of 2020. It complied with 29% of these demands. Twitter also noted in the report that its technology is proactively identifying more than 65% of abusive content for human review, rather than relying on reports submitted by Twitter users.