The numbers behind the Twitter-government faceoff
The battle lines between microblogging platform Twitter and the government of India have been years in the making, and 2020 was a tipping point of sorts. On the one hand, the number of requests from the Indian government to Twitter to share user information or remove content grew at an unprecedented rate in the second half of 2020. On the other hand, the share of instances in which Twitter took some action on such requests plunged to an all-time low, shows data released by the microblogging platform last week.
Twitter released this data as part of its transparency report for the second half of 2020 (July to December). Like Twitter, Facebook and Google also put out bi-annual transparency reports. However, unlike Twitter, their reports for the second half of 2020, released earlier this year, don’t show spikes in requests from the Indian government of the kind that Twitter has seen, though their user base is higher.
In 2020, India led all governments in information requests to Twitter. In 2019, it was ranked third. Between the second half of 2019 and of 2020, Twitter saw a spike of about 4-fold in information requests from the Indian government—nearly three times the world increase. Meanwhile, Facebook and Google reported incremental India numbers that were more in line with global trends.
The Indian government has been feuding with Twitter on the principles and boundaries of arbitrating content, and on having a formal mechanism to deal with requests. In the second half of 2020, there were 15 countries that made 50 or more information requests to Twitter. The share of requests from the Indian government on which Twitter took some action was 1%—the lowest among this set.
Outlier Twitter
Twitter’s ‘compliance rate’ (the term platforms use for action taken on a request) has been consistently falling in India. Between 2013 and 2020, amid a rising count of information requests from the Indian government, the percentage of requests for which Twitter shared some information fell from 32% to 1%. By comparison, Facebook, which receives about 10 times more information requests than Twitter in India, has maintained a compliance rate of 45-55% in the country. Google’s compliance rate has been similar to Facebook, 45-65%.
