It appears that government entities and figures are interested in the Twitter activity of journalists across the globe.
On Thursday, Twitter informed its users that it had received a record number of government demands targeting journalists from July to December of last year. During this five-month period, the social media site received a total of 47,572 demands regarding 198,931 accounts. Approximately, this is an increase of 103%. Of those demands, approximately 25% came from federal governments. Furthermore, 20% of the demands from national agencies came from the U.S. government.
“We have and will continue to fight for the people who use Twitter to raise their voice,” a statement from Twitter reads.
“We continue to see a concerning trend toward attempts to limit global press freedom, with an increase in government legal demands targeting journalists, as well as an overall increasing number of legal demands on accounts – both represent record highs since reporting began.”
Digging deeper into the social media giant’s interaction with the American government, Twitter reportedly denied 29 requests from the U.S. government that would have helped determine the identities of anonymous users. However, Twitter did comply with nearly 70% of the U.S. government’s requests.
“Of those 29 requests, we filed lawsuits to fight back in two instances and succeeded in convincing courts to apply First Amendment protections in one case. The other case remains pending,” Twitter stated.
“As in past reports, Twitter is not reporting on any other requests for information deemed to be related to national security processes because of limitations imposed on us by the U.S. government. We have been fighting for more transparency around this process for years, and continue to fight this issue in our court case, Twitter v. Garland, and are currently awaiting a decision on appeal.”
