When it comes to free speech and censorship, it’s mostly the USA, China and
islamistic countries that limit these as far as needed. Also Twitter is affected
by this and the new transparency report shows the amount of requests for
tweet removals have been issued within the last 6 months.

Interesting but not surprising, the most requests have been issued from the USA due to the DMCA and other copyright-related concerns. So it doesn’t surprise that 948(!) requests have been issued by the USA alone, followed by 147 requests from Japan.

This request list is for user information alone. It’s not yet clarified if the user data is used to file lawsuits against the requested users’ data or otherwise used.

Interesting though that Twitter followed 75% of all requests from the USA and issued users’ or account data. So you might wanna think about privacy twice here and probably hold back on private and/or intime data here!

Removal requests have been done with less encouragement.Only 5 countries seem to have filed for removal requests only:

However these requests only apply to these issued from the help center where offending tweets on corresponding accounts have been reported and filed for removal. Surprisingly, none have been listed from the USA though.

But now we come to the most critic point of all, the Copyright Takedown Notices. Here the amount is not keyed by country but I wouldn’t be too surprised, if most of these Takedown notices would come from Germany or the USA…

So whatever is tweeted on Twitter, you’d better double-check what you post or you might be targeted and probably face consequences. Whenever you thought, the Internet is a safe place for privacy and or your private thoughts, you’d better think twice. And you might want to reconsider what to tweet/post and what not as your content might face trouble and thus yourself, too.

Fortunately, Twitter plays half with open cards when it comes to account tampering. The report issued might be another step of honesty. Interesting to see how facebook is affected by such statistics. According to the statement, that facebook claims the crown for having one billion users atm, the numbers micht be significantly higher.

Interesting however is that the amount of requests in relation to the hundreds of million tweets sent via Twitter within half a year is rather small. But who knows. A change in the TOS may ghange this behavior significantly. I’d be suspicious from now on!

Less encouraging this situation is, however as you never know when someone is accessing your personal data on Twitter! But on the other hand: If you already have a facebook account, why bother about this concern anyways?