Twitter sees record increase in gov't data requests

Steven Loeb · August 11, 2015 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/3f6e

Meanwhile Persicope racked up almost 1,400 copyright takedowns in only three months

Ever since the NS leaks a few years ago, companies have been putting out transparency reports, showing just how much information the government is asking for. Instead of shaming the government into not seeking quite as much information on its citizens, the opposite has happened: requests have been going up at an alarming rate.

Twitter released its biannual transparency report on Tuesday, and there's some very interesting developments this time around. Starting in January of this year, and ending in June, Twitter received 4,363 requests for information from governments around the world. That is up 78% from the 2,871 it received in the last half of 2014.

That means non-public information requested by law enforcement due to a subpoena, court order, or other valid legal process. Information is also given out in response to a valid emergency request.

The number of requests over the last six months is a pretty big deal, because it translates into the "largest increase in requests and affected accounts between reporting periods since we began publishing the Transparency Report in 2012," the company said.

As always, when broken down by country, the United States made the majority of requests for account information, totally 2,436, or over half, 56%, of all requests received. That is up from 1,622 requests in the previous report.  In all, 80% of the requests made by the United States government were complied with.

It goes down sharply from there: Japan made 425 requests, for 10%, while Turkey had 412, for 9%, and the United Kingdom had 299, for 7% of all requests. There are also four new countries that have been added to the list: Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Poland, and Serbia, bringing the total to 62 countries.

In all, Twitter said it complied with 58% of the total number of requests, up from 52% in the previous six months. 

The other interesting stat to come out of this report has to do with Periscope, and the number of copyright notices that Twitter received due to the live-streaming app that it bought in March for $86 million.

In just three months, Periscope racked up just under 1,400 requests for copyrighted material to be taken down, including over 800 requests in June alone, up from 541 in May. Vine, by comparison, had 2,405 requests in six months, and its highest total was 501 in March.

In all, Twitter complied with Periscope data take down requests 864 times, or 71%, in all, and 79% of the requests made in June. It complied with a total of 68% of Vine take down requests.

The issue of copyright material has been a sticking point for live-streaming apps ever since Periscope, and its competitors like Meerkat, burst onto the scene earlier this year. During the big fight between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao in May, both Meerkat and the Twitter-owned Periscope were both accused of not doing enough to remove unauthorized streams of the match. 

Now the Twitter transparency numbers show that the problem is real, and only getting worse. Also, there's not much that can really be done about it. Facebook has attempted to get around this problem by controlling the content, and giving access only to the rich and famous, rather than the masses, but that is not an option for Twitter.

(Image source: transparency.twitter.com)

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What is Twitter?

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. 

Where did the idea for Twitter come from?

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.

How is Twitter built?

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.

How do you make money from Twitter?

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.

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