Twitter warns governments are demanding user info at an alarming rate

[demmiblue]

Source: Axios

Twitter warned Thursday that local, state and national governments around the world are asking the company to remove content and provide private information of user accounts at an alarming rate.

Driving the news: The company said in a new report that it received a record number of legal demands from governments, nearly 50,000 during a six-month period last year.

Details: The 47,572 legal demands were for 198,931 unique accounts.

The U.S. makes up the majority of demands for account information, accounting for 20% of the requests, per Twitter.

Read more: https://www.axios.com/2022/07/28/twitter-report-government-demand-user-info

[grumpyduck]

1. Well, did anybody really think this wouldn't happen?

[bucolic_frolic]

2. Dissident monitoring machine in plain sight

[hvn_nbr_2]

3. "the majority of demands ... 20% of the requests"

20% is the majority?

[Igel]

5. Yeah, it's sketchy.

On the other hand, 20% of the requests would be 9,100 requests or so.

If those 9,100 requests asked about a total of 100,000 accounts, that would mean 20% of the requests covered a majority of the demands for individual account information.

You can make sense out of without being too creative; that doesn't mean the reporter didn't mess up and that kind of fudging is the correct approach.

[Lancero]

7. 20% is actually the number that Twitter went with.

The reporting is accurate considering it matches with the source, but it's possible that the source itself was fudged.

[DivByZero]

12. It's possible

If the US is responsible for 20% of the requests, and the remaining 80% are requests from 10 different countries, then the US portion would be the majority of requests compared to any other country.

[Hugh_Lebowski]

13. Actually the proper word then would be plurality ... just sayin (nt)

[Rebl2]

4. Glad I

don’t have Twitter.

[2naSalit]

10. Same here.

The only social media I engage in is DU and my personal email account.

[Initech]

6. I spend a good majority of my time on Twitter...

Telling people like Lauren Boebert, Ron DeSantis, and Tucker Carlson to eat shit. So...

[Jarqui]

8. I deleted my Twitter account when Elon Musk bought Twitter ...

Doubt I want to revive it - particularly now.

[EX500rider]

14. Except he didn't buy it,,,,, nt

[Jarqui]

15. That's how it turned out but for a while there ...

The fact they'd sell it to him turned me off twitter.

[SpankMe]

9. Does anyone know how many requests they complied with? n/t

[intheflow]

11. How many of the US requests were from the J6 Committee?

It sounds bad, and generally is bad when governments root around in private citizens' business, but on the other hand, there are legit reasons to request user info. Perhaps especially when investigating sedition/insurrection/a coup.