48,000 per cent increase in demands to remove content from Twitter: Report

There is an increase of 48,000 per cent in the legal demands made by the Indian government and courts to remove content from Twitter between 2014 and 2020, as per an analysis of Twitter’s global transparency reports has shown.

The number of content blocking orders given to social media companies by the government, increased by approximately 1,991 per cent, said a report by The Indian Express.

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Sanjay Dhotre, minister of State for electronics and IT, said, the government under section 69A of the Information Technology Act, asked social media firms to take down 9,849 links from their platform in 2020. About 471 such requests were made by the government in 2014.

About 11 per cent of the global demands for content removal and information requests, were made by India. The country comes fourth after Japan, Russia and Turkey. Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, allows the government to block public access to content in the interest of national security.

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Between 2014 to 2020, the Centre made 89 legal demands against verified journalists and news outlets. The instances of such demands increased during the farmers’ protests and towards the peak of the pandemic, as per the report.