Providing more #transparency into legal requests to remove content

Since our first transparency report was published in 2012, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in the number of content removal requests we receive from governments, law enforcement, and other authorized organizations. While we continue to publish copies of these requests on Lumen for public review, we’ve also been evaluating ways to provide additional transparency into these requests.

Historically, the removal requests section of the Twitter Transparency Report has provided insights into legal requests where accounts or Tweets ended up being withheld in a specific jurisdiction or when no action was taken. Now, we’ve included the legal requests where reported content was removed due to Terms of Service (TOS) violations. This change enhances transparency around the actions we take in response to these requests. We will continue to experiment with ways to increase transparency in future reports.

More details, data, and insights for all of the areas covered by our report are available on our transparency site. To pique your interest, here are a few notable trends we’ve seen since our last report: an 89 percent increase in copyright takedown notices, a 33 percent decrease in trademark requests, and a 27 percent increase in requests for account information.