from the whatever-elon-has-said,-he’s-done-the-opposite dept
To hear Elon and his biggest fans tell the story, pre-Elon Twitter was a hellhole of censorship often driven by government demands, and he had to take over the company to “bring free speech back.” As astute observers not easily misled by nonsense peddlers knew, however, in actuality, old Twitter was actually one of the most welcoming platforms to speech that other platforms refused to host, and was among the most aggressive at pushing back on government demands.
Twitter’s transparency reports on this were clear. Just looking at the last transparency report released before Elon took over, you can see this quite clearly. On requests for information from governments around the globe, it only complied with around 40%:
And when it came to government demands to remove information whether by court order or other government demands, its compliance rate was around 51% globally:
If you dig into the details, not surprisingly, you find that the variation country to country is significant. So, from here, you can see the countries that sent the most legal demands over the period of that report (second half of 2021):
From that, you can see that Twitter complied with just 20% of requests from India, and 44% of the requests from Japan.
Clearly, the company made a real effort to evaluate the requests and their legal merit before making a decision.
Now, as we just reported, Twitter under Elon has stopped doing transparency reports, though it did release a ridiculous blog post that wasn’t “transparent” at all and literally said: “Twitter’s compliance rate for these requests varied by requester country.” But provided no actual data on the compliance rate at all.
Thankfully, Russel Brandom over at Rest of World, realized that Twitter has still been automatically reporting government demand info to the good folks at the LumenDatabase… and from that found that Elon’s Twitter has been way more compliant in giving in to exactly what governments are demanding, both for removing content and for handing over information. And, from the look of things, governments are fucking thrilled with this, seeing as the numbers of demands went way, way up.
That last column is “post-Elon.” So, again, Elon’s Twitter is now doing the very nonsense that Elon and his fans falsely thought old Twitter did. We already knew that Elon had caved in and was agreeing to take down accounts from journalists and activists in India, which old Twitter had drawn a line and said it refused to cross.
Notably, and importantly, just as Brandom was doing this research, Twitter abruptly stopped sharing this data:
“Historically, it seems Twitter has sent a copy of everything they’ve received to us,” says Adam Holland, who manages the project for the Berkman-Klein center. “My understanding is that they have a small team of people that work on this and it’s a largely automatic process.”
The biggest irregularity came earlier this month when Twitter’s self-reports abruptly stopped. After averaging over a hundred copyright claims a day, the flow of new reports halted on April 15th, and Twitter has not made a submission to the database in 12 days.
After the article went up, Lumen put out a statement on Mastodon noting that Twitter had deliberately stopped sharing as their “data sharing policies are under review” and that “they will update Lumen once there is more information.”
So… as Elon has promised to be more about free speech and transparency, and less about giving in to government censorship and surveillance requests, the reality is that, once again, he’s done literally the opposite of that.
Filed Under: elon musk, government requests, lumen database, surveillance, takedowns, transparency, transparency reports
Companies: twitter
