'Take it down': Indian requests to social media firms at record highs

Twitter got the largest rise in government demand about content compared to the pre-pandemic period

Twitter’s decision to go to court against the Indian government’s requests to take down content has come after a surge in such demands by the state.

Government requests to technology platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Google for removing content is up significantly compared to an equivalent period in 2019, shows an analysis of data from the companies' periodic disclosures. India’s requests for content removal on Twitter for the six months ending June 2021 are up more than 350 per cent from the figure in the same period for 2019. User information requests are up nearly 873 percent compared to the 2019 figure.

Another way to look at such requests is to take the average of the period since the pandemic began, and compare it to the pre-pandemic numbers.  
 

The half-year average number of government requests for Twitter user information was 651 between June 2018 and December 2019. The average has jumped to 4,882 in the period since then as per data till June 2021. Content removal requests have jumped from 562 to 2,801 in the same period (see chart 1).

Facebook has data till December 2021, corresponding to four half-yearly periods. The half-yearly average number of requests for user information was around 21,692 based on the pre-pandemic average. This has since increased to 42,879 (see chart 2).

Google had a half-year average of 8,603 government requests for user information between June 2018 and December 2019. The post-pandemic average is 13,802. Content removal requests rose from a pre-pandemic average of 1035 to 1381 after the pandemic showed data as of December 2021 (see chart 3).

Twitter’s transparency report in June says that news outlets have also seen legal demands to remove content from both government and lawyers representing individuals.

“172 accounts of verified journalists and news outlets from around the world were subject to 231 legal demands, a 14% decrease in the number of accounts since the previous reporting period. These included legal demands from India (89), Turkey (59), Russia (40), and Pakistan (18),” it said.

Twitter complied with 2.3 per cent of the requests for user information and 11.8 per cent of the content removal requests.  Around 64 per cent of requests to Facebook results in it producing some data, according to its own transparency report in the latest period. Google produced data on 57 per cent of requests for disclosure of user information for the six months ending June 2021.

Social media platforms with a smaller Indian footprint, like Reddit, the content ranking website, have also seen an escalation in requests on content removal.

Reddit saw 50 requests for content removal from government or law enforcement agencies in 2021. There were less than ten such requests in 2019.

“In 2021, Reddit received 292 requests from law enforcement or government agencies to remove content from the platform, a 15% increase from 2020. 90% of these removal requests originated from outside the US. The three countries requesting the most removal of content were the United Kingdom, India, and Australia,” said its transparency report for 2021.