Government demands to remove Twitter content hit record high

Twitter revealed on Tuesday that governments' requests for content to be removed from the platform hit a record high in the first six months of 2021.

Governments made 43,387 legal demands for content to be pulled down from 196,878 accounts between January and the end of June.

Twitter's latest transparency report showed that 95 percent of the requests came from Japan, Russia, Turkey, India and South Korea.

The platform "withheld" access to content or required accounts to take down posts in response to 54 percent of the demands.

"We're facing unprecedented challenges as governments around the world increasingly attempt to intervene and remove content," Twitter's vice president of global public policy and philanthropy Sinéad McSweeney said in a statement. "This threat to privacy and freedom of expression is a deeply worrying trend that requires our full attention."

Twitter's transparency report also showed that government requests to preserve account information fell four percent compared to the previous reporting period, the last six months of 2020. The United States accounted for 57 percent of preservation requests.