Twitter: We Comply with 63% of Government Request 

July 2, 2012 by Chris Taylor 6

 

Twitter released its first transparency report Monday — but the takeaway may not have been exactly what the company hoped for.

The report focused on several matters relating to users’ freedom to post what they want: how frequently governments around the world ask for Twitter users’ account details; how often Twitter complies with those requests; and how many copyright complaints it receives and grants to content-owning companies.

Twitter has responded to requests for 1,181 users’ information thus far in 2012, the report reveals. The vast majority of those were inside the U.S. Overall, in 63% of cases, some form of user info was handed over. (In U.S. cases, that rose to 75%.)

The company was at pains to point out that it informs users when they’ve been asked to hand over details, except where prohibited by law. It also trumpeted the fact that it has acceded to no government requests for outright censorship of tweets. (Law enforcement in five countries asked for that.)

Part of Twitter’s reason for posting this information now? Such official inquiries are on the rise. “We’ve received more government requests in the first half of 2012 than in the entirety of 2011,” writes Jeremy Kessel, Twitter’s manager of legal policy, in the transparency blog post.

“Moving forward, we’ll be publishing an updated version of this information twice a year.”

By the numbers, it seems DMCA complaints take up a much larger amount of Twitter’s time. The company has received 3,378 copyright takedown notices thus far in 2012; it has deleted more than 5,000 tweets as a result.

Twitter’s transparency report earned it a rare shout-out from Google. The two companies have previously fought a war of words over tweets in search results, but Kessel gave Google credit for its transparency in his post. Google responded in kind with this tweet.

But it also came at an unfortunate time: the same day that a judge in New York reaffirmed that Twitter needed to hand over details on Occupy Wall Street protestor Malcolm Harris to the state Attorney General’s office.

Twitter reaffirmed that users owned their content, and said it was “considering our options” when it came to a legal response.

The timing is especially ironic, as that case — which is being closely watched as a barometer of Twitter’s commitment to user privacy — is a criminal investigation. Twitter attempted to mitigate the number of government requests it acceded to by pointing out, in this Help Center article, that those requests were “typically in connection with criminal investigations or cases.”

So which side of the ledger will the Occupy protestor’s case fall on? We should know by the time Twitter releases its second transparency report.