Twitter Blog, Monday,
July 02, 2012
Wednesday
marks Independence Day here in the United States. Beyond the fireworks and
barbecue, July 4th serves as an important reminder of the need to hold
governments accountable, especially on behalf of those who may not have a
chance to do so themselves.
With that
in mind, today we’re unveiling our first Twitter Transparency Report. Inspired
by the great work done by our peers @Google, the primary goal of this report is
to shed more light on:
- government
requests received for user information,
- government
requests received to withhold content, and
- DMCA
takedown notices received from copyright holders.
The report
also provides insight into whether or not we take action on these requests.
One of our
goals is to grow Twitter in a way that makes us proud. This ideal informs many
of our policies and guides us in making difficult decisions. One example is our
long-standing policy to proactively notify users of requests for their account
information unless we’re prohibited by law; another example is transmitting
DMCA takedown notices and requests to withhold content to Chilling Effects.
These policies help inform people, increase awareness and hold all involved
parties––including ourselves––more accountable; the release of our first
Transparency Report aims to further these ambitions.
Here’s the
data, which dates back to January 1, 2012. You can also find these tables,
along with more information about the data, in our Help Center.
We’ve
received more government requests in the first half of 2012, as outlined in
this initial dataset, than in the entirety of 2011. Moving forward, we’ll be
publishing an updated version of this information twice a year.
Along with
publishing our Transparency Report, we’re also partnering with Herdict, which
“collects and disseminates real-time, crowdsourced information about Internet
filtering, denial of service attacks, and other blockages.” This new
partnership aims to drive more traffic and exposure to Herdict, while also
empowering the web community at large to help keep an eye on whether users can
access Twitter around the world.
These two
new initiatives—the Twitter Transparency Report and our partnership with
Herdict—are an important part of keeping the Tweets flowing.
Posted by
Jeremy Kessel, Manager, Legal Policy (@jer)
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