New Delhi: The Indian government made 139 account information requests involving 495 accounts during January to June 2016 to social media site Twitter, according to its biannual Transparency Report.
Information requests include worldwide government requests Twitter received for account information, typically in connection with criminal investigations, the report explained.
According to the report, Twitter received 42 requests for removal of content from Indian government, police and other law enforcement agencies, while one request was based on court order.
Globally, the US topped the list of countries in terms of number of account information requests with 2,520 requests covering 8,009 accounts of which Twitter produced information on 82 per cent of the cases.
Twitter said that despite decrease in number of requests from the US, the country still remains the "top global requester", comprising 44 per cent of total requests received.
Other governments that made a large number of requests for account information to Twitter were that of Japan with 732 requests (988 accounts), the UK with 631 requests (1,071 accounts), and France with 572 requests (687 accounts).
Turkey was just above India with 280 requests for information covering 443 accounts. In case of India, Twitter shared some information in 31 per cent of the cases. Pakistan placed only 6 account information requests with Twitter, covering 22 accounts.
"We have received two per cent more government requests for account information affecting 8 per cent more accounts during the first half of 2016 than in the previous reporting period," Twitter said.
Turkey topped the list of countries requesting Twitter to remove content from its site -- it received 712 court orders and 1,781 requests from Turkish government and police involving 14,953 accounts. Next came Russia, which made 1,601 requests involved 1,698 accounts, followed by France (466 requests, 758 accounts).
"In the first half of 2016, Twitter received 13 per cent more removal requests compared to the previous reporting period. Removal requests originated from 37 countries, five of which are appearing in the report for the first time: Azerbaijan, Chile, Israel, Maldives, and the Philippines," Twitter said.
Overall, removal requests affected a total of 20,594 accounts -- 2,600 had some content removed for violating Twitter's Terms of Service, 2,799 accounts had some content withheld (account-level or Tweet-level), and no action was taken on the remaining 15,195 accounts, it added.
