Twitter Transparency Report
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Twitter’s biannual report came out this week:
Evolving our Twitter Transparency Report: Expanded Data and Insights The report, from Twitter, highlights trends in legal requests, intellectual property-related requests, Twitter Rules enforcement, platform manipulation, and email privacy best practices. The report also provides insight into whether or not they take action on these requests. |
Internet freedom and online expression remain under significant pressure and constraint, a trend observed across recent reports. The latest Twitter Transparency Report shows that Twitter received approximately 80% more global legal demands, impacting more than twice as many accounts compared to the previous reporting period. Similar to the last reporting period, roughly 87% of the total global volume originated from only two countries: Russia and Turkey. Twitter also received 10% more government information requests, which is the largest percentage increase since our July-December 2015 report.
The new Twitter Rules enforcement section is a significant milestone on Twitter’s transparency journey. It provides data and insights into the following areas of enforcement approach: abuse, hateful conduct, private information, child sexual exploitation, sensitive media, and violent threats. These categories represent some of the most common reports that Twitter receives, and their intention is to include more categories in future reports.
Platform Manipulation – This also marks the first Twitter Transparency Report in which metrics are published pertaining to Twitter actions to fight spam and other malicious forms of automation. This builds on recent work to disclose a full database of previously removed content and accounts that had potential links to state-backed information operations.
Efforts to eradicate child sexual exploitation – Twitter does not tolerate any material that features or promotes child sexual exploitation — whether in Direct Message or elsewhere throughout the service. This includes media, text, illustrations, or computer-generated images. When we remove content, we immediately report it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). NCMEC makes reports available to the appropriate law enforcement agencies around the world to facilitate investigations and prosecutions.
Removing terrorist content – Twitter continues efforts to eradicate content from it’s platform that violates the Twitter rule prohibiting the promotion of terrorism. Twitter suspended a total of 205,156 accounts under this policy in the period of January 1, 2018, through June 30, 2018. Of those suspensions, 91% consisted of accounts that were proactively flagged by internal, proprietary tools. Continuing the trend Twitter has seen for some time, the number of reports received from governments of terrorist content decreased by 77% compared to the previous reporting period. Government reports now constitute less than 0.1% of all suspensions in the reported time period as a result of the scale of our technological approach.
IPA Permalink: https://information-professionals.org/twitter-transparency-report/