From January to June 2017, Serbian Government addressed Twitter company on 12 occasions requesting account information on the corresponding number of users of this social network; Twitter provided some of the data for four profiles.
According to the data from the annual Twitter Transparency Report , the Government first addressed the company in 2015, when nine requests were filed, while in the course of 2016 the number of requests was increased to the total of 17 requests which were filed for the purpose of checking 19 profiles. With 12 new requests filed in the first half of 2017, the total number of requests grew to 38 requests to check 40 users.
On the average, over the period of two and a half years, Twitter filed some of the requested data to the Government in 24% cases.
Beside this, Serbia requested Twitter to remove certain profiles or content from this social network on two occasions – once in the first half of 2015, and then in the first half of 2016. As given at the website, these requests were not subject to court order, but were filed by the Government agency, police, or some other body. Twitter did not reply affirmatively to either request for removal.
Requests for removal mostly relate to content which is prohibited in a certain country, for instance, a court order requiring the removel of defamatory statments or request to remove prohibited content such as Nazi symbols in Germany, reads the Report.
Serbia is the only country in the region which has addressed Twitter to get information on users this year. In 2015, Croatia and Montenegro addressed Twitter with one request respectively, same as Albania in 2014.
In the course of this year, Twitter has received 6,448 requests for information on 11,115 user profiles, and the requesting party has been provided some data in 60% cases.
The first place according to the number of requests is currently occupied by the USA, which has filed 2,111 requests for information on 4,594 user accounts. Japan takes the second position with 1,384 requests, followed by the United Kingdom, Turkey, and France.
While Twitter provided some of the requested information to most of these countries, in the case of Turkey there was not a single reply to 554 requests for 902 profiles. Turkey also got to the first place according to the number of requests for content removal – 715 by court order and 1,995 based on requests of government agencies or police. Twitter removed a part of such content in 23% of requests.
Since 2012, Twitter has been publishing transparency reports twice a year, and has so far received requests from 83 countries worldwide.
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