Since the takeover of Twitter by billionaire Elon Musk last October, the company has fully complied with more than 80 percent of requests from governments and courts to remove content, an increase of about 30 percent from before. That’s according to an analysis published Thursday by the tech newspaper Rest of World. According to Forbes, the analysis reveals that Musk’s promise to curb political censorship does not match reality. Forbes reached out to Twitter for comment, but says it only received an automated response in the form of a poop emoji, which the company has been using for more than a month to respond to requests for comment from the press.
Musk granted eight hundred requests
Since Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the company has received 971 government requests to remove content and fully complied with 808 of them, according to the analysis. Another 154 were partially granted. Most of the recent requests have come from India, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Germany, which have tightened internet regulation in the past year, while no requests have come from the United States, according to the analysis.
The latest figures show a sharp increase in Twitter’s cooperation with authorities compared to the six months before Musk’s takeover, when Twitter fully complied with 280 of 550 requests, or roughly 51 percent. After Musk’s purchase of Twitter, that figure rose to 83 percent.
The analysis uses information from Lumen, a database run by the Berkman Klein Center For Internet & Society at Harvard University that tracks requests to remove online content. Twitter and other tech companies such as Google and Wikipedia voluntarily share this data with the Lumen database.
Inconvenient accounts
When Musk bought Twitter, he said he wanted to strengthen free speech and curb political bias, as he considered the network to be left-leaning. However, he has already faced several controversies related to free speech, including accusations of censorship when dozens of tweets about a BBC documentary critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi were pulled in January after a request from India’s information ministry. Twitter also suspended several accounts that tracked the private jets of billionaires, including Musk’s.
Musk justified his purchase of Twitter by seeking to provide “a common digital square where a wide range of views can be healthily discussed.” He gave several journalists access to internal communications of company employees from when he did not yet own the company. At the time, key employees were discussing issues such as former President Donald Trump’s account being blocked or the dissemination of a New York Post (NYP) report on Hunter Biden’s business activities. He also restored some previously blocked Twitter accounts, including Trump’s, and fired about 10 percent of Twitter’s staff.
Source: ČTK
