CALIFORNIA: Twitter complied at least partially with every government request to take down content after Elon Musk, the self-described free speech absolutist, took over the platform, Twitter’s self-reported data shows.
The social media giant fully and partially complied with 98.8% of takedown requests it received from 27 October, the date of Musk’s takeover, to 13 April, including hundreds of requests from Turkey and India, which faced criticism for silencing critics, Al-Jazeera said.
Twitter fully complied with 808, or 83%, of requests and partially did so with 154, or 15.8%, Twitter data compiled by the Berkman Centre for Internet Society at Harvard Law School.
Twitter didn’t report rejecting a single takedown request during the period, although it didn’t report the outcome of 9 cases. Turkey was responsible for half of all the takedown requests, followed by India and Germany, which accounted for 26% and 5%, respectively.
The data increases questions about Musk’s stated commitment to safeguarding free speech, which the chief executive of Tesla company invoked as a key reason for purchasing the site the previous year for 44bn dollars. Under Twitter’s last ownership, the social media site complied with government takedown requests at a lower rate.
Twitter fully complied with 440, or 50%, of requests and partially adhered to 377, or 42%, during the 12 months before Musk’s takeover. Turkey was the most significant source of these requests at 27%, followed by South Korea at 20.6% and India at 12.8%.
The development was cause for concern, said Corynne McSherry, a legal director of the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
McSherry told Al Jazeera, “As Twitter’s last reports and actions show, government takedown requests frequently legally flawed, improper, and even lawful requests may conflict with global freedom of expression principles,”
She said, “And while several have abandoned Twitter, it remains the powerful and important platform internationally, particularly for journalists and human rights defenders,”. If Twitter is complying so quickly with takedown requests, one has to wonder what other government requests Twitter is fulfilling without protest.”
The growth in government takedowns follows the series of shakeups Elon Musk has undertaken at Twitter, including slashing the workforce by 80% to around 1,500 workers and axing the company’s entire human rights team.
Twitter has shuttered many of its regional offices
Twitter has shuttered many of its regional offices, including in India, where the administration of Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, has introduced sweeping measures to regulate social media and the internet. Twitter hasn’t published an internal transparency report on government removal requests, and data is collected through automatic submissions from Twitter to the Lumen database.
A researcher, Jyoti Panday, at the Internet Governance Project at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said business concerns at Twitter are taking precedence over human rights.
Panday told Al Jazeera, “Elon Musk came in and disbanded a lot of critical teams that were spread out worldwide,”
She said, “Users have the right to be heard, and they’re approaching the platform to say, ‘Can you put back our content? We can prove it isn’t illegal and not unlawful content. I am well within my rights,’ but those mechanisms would be in place to judge
completely dispersed, and there’s no response,” Twitter didn’t respond to the request for comment.
