Twitter reported that requests to reveal user data have skyrocketed 40 percent since July, with the majority of demands coming from the US government. Overall, the demands affected 128 percent more account holders during the second half of 2014, according to Twitter’s latest transparency report.
According to Jeremy Kessel, a Twitter senior manager:
We saw an overall increase of 40 percent in government requests for Twitter user account information since our last report. While requests have increased in many countries, Russia, Turkey, and the United States stand out from the rest. In Russia, we went from having never received a request to receiving more than 100 requests for account information during this reporting period. We did not provide information in response to any of those requests. Requests from Turkey increased over 150 percent. Again, we did not provide information in response to any of those requests. Meanwhile, we saw a 29 percent increase in requests from the United States, while our compliance rate increased 8 percent.
Twitter’s figures are in line with a global trend in which governments are demanding more information from tech companies, from AOL to Yahoo. In March, for example, Google reported that requests for user data increased 120 percent over four years.
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