As you may recall, Twitter and Turkey had a bit of a showdown last year, after the service was banned in the country following accusations of corruption against the Prime Minister.
Everything eventually went back to normal, as Twitter was restored, but that does not mean that things are just fine not, and are running smoothly between them. As the company's latest transparency report shows, Turkey is ramping up its efforts to use Twitter to go after its citizens.
In the second half of 2014, the Turkish government made 356 requests for information on 496 accounts, an increase of over 150% from the first half of the year. Twitter did not provide information in response to any of those requests.
The country still pales in comparison to the United States with that figure, though; the U.S. made 1,622 requests, by far the most of any country, on 3,299 accounts. Twitter produced "some information" in 80% of those cases.
Other countries with high numbers of requests include Japan, with 288; the United Kingdom, with 116; and Russia, with 108. Overall, there was an increase of 40% in government requests for Twitter user account information since the last report was released.
When it came to government request for removal of data, that is where Turkey really stands out. It made a total of 477 removal requests in the last six months, on 2,642 accounts. That number is alarmingly high; no other country had even 100 requests, with Russia coming in second with 91. As you'd expect, Turkish requests "generally focused on claimed violations of personal rights (such as defamation) of both private citizens and government officials," Twitter wrote in a blog post.
Unlike with the government information requests, Twitter complied in 50% of Turkey's requests for removal, but not without a fight: it filed court objections in response to over 70% of the Turkish court orders we received. It won 5% of those appeals, lost 80% , and still has 15% pending with the courts.
Finally, the report also broke down Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices. There were 16,648 notices in the last six months, up from 9,199, or 81% from the previous report. In 66% of those cases, some material was removed.
Twitter vs Turkey
The fact that Turkey is still trying get information off of Twitter, and increasingly use the service to gain information about its citizens, might mean that the two sides are, once again, going to go head to head.
In March, the country banned Twitter after Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan was accused of corruption on the service. The ban also happened to take place around a week before local elections were to take place in the country on March 30.
Of course, neither of those is not the official reason the government is giving for the move. Instead, they accused Twitter of refusing to remove certain links from its site, which have been deemed illegal by the country's courts. After two weeks, the courts ordered the government to turn the service back on.
After that defeat, the government vowed to go after Twitter again, this time regarding its taxes.
In addition to Twitter, the Turkish government also banned YouTube last year. The service was shut down on March 27th after a video appeared on the site with audio from a conversation between Turkey’s foreign minister, spy chief, and a top general in a high-security meeting that centered on the military situation in Syria. A court deemed that ban unconstitutional, saying that it was too broad. The decision still allowed the government to ban 15 individual videos.
(Image source: redherring.com)
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Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.
