Twitter saw a 152 percent surge in demand for content removals from India while the Indian government sent more information requests than the US for the first time since 2012. According to Twitter's biannual Transparency Report released on Wednesday, India is the largest source of government information requests and the second-largest source of content removal requests between July to December 2020, accounting for 25 percent and 18 percent of the global volume respectively. However, Twitter complied with only about 1 percent of information requests and 9 percent of content removal requests. Why this matters: Twitter has complied with very few requests in 2020, but the new IT Rules, which were notified in February 2021, contain provisions that require social media platforms to turn over information requested by the government within 72 hours of notice and remove content deemed unlawful by the government within 36 hours. Given this and the fact that Twitter is yet to fully comply with the new Rules, it will be interesting to see how Twitter responded to government requests for the January to June 2021 period, which is the same period in which the government issued orders to block more than 1,100 accounts related to the farmer’s protest and censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised India’s handling of the second surge of the COVID-19 pandemic. "Over the past year, we’ve experienced and continue to navigate severe global challenges, including the coronavirus pandemic. We’ve also seen concerted attempts by governments to limit access to the Internet generally and to Twitter specifically," the platform said in a…
