With terror in spotlight, government requests for Twitter data surge

At a moment when governments around the world are working harder to confront the Islamic State and its propagandists on the web, Twitter said requests from officials to strip tweets from the service grew by nearly 13 percent in the past six months. The company's transparency report, which highlights trends in the legal requests the social media giant receives, shows that governments are flagging more content than ever before for removal and asking for information on potential criminal and terrorist suspects. In the past six months, Twitter says it received 5,600 requests for information on 13,152 accounts around the world – mostly in the form of subpoenas – including more than 2,500 in the US.

The company also received 5,195 government requests to remove information from 20,571 accounts, with nearly 80 percent of those requests coming from Turkey and Russia. Twitter says it withheld or removed content in response to 16 percent of government requests. In the US, most requests for information from accounts came from the FBI, the US Secret Service, and the New York County District Attorney’s Office. In its previous transparency report, Twitter revealed that government officials asked for 4,617 removals from 11,092 accounts in the second half of 2015.