Twitter, which has been strongly committed to “keeping the Tweets flowing,” today unveiled its first Twitter Transparency Report. This report documents the requests the microblogging service receives from governments and copyright holders requesting Twitter to take down content or divulge user information.
Taking a cue from Google, which publishes a similar report, the report’s primary goal is to shed light on government requests for user information, government requests for withholding content, and DMCA takedown notices from copyright holders. Twitter is also providing data on whether it complies with these requests.
Legal Policy Manager Jeremy Kessel noted on Twitter’s blog that the company’s first report, which covers the period from January 1 to June 30 of this year, shows Twitter receiving more government requests in the first half of 2012 than in all of 2011. Twitter received 849 requests from governments for user information and six requests for content removal. Notably, Twitter did not comply with any of the content removal notices from governments. Future reports will be published biannually.
As part of their transparency related announcements, Twitter also announced their partnership with Herdict. In the coming weeks, we will provide more details, but it will hopefully encourage more users to track the accessibility of Twitter and the sites that are important to our other partner organizations. We are really excited about this partnership and we can’t wait to show you our new features.
