Transparency Report

Communicate fearlessly to build trust

Today’s publication marks our fifth Transparency Report. With each successive edition, we aim to provide more meaningful and constructive insight into the global government and copyright requests we receive, and their respective impact, with the goal of making this report more compelling and informative for you.

However, one section in particular has been notably absent from our all of our previous reports, including today’s: our disclosures on national security requests.

Our new report shows a steady increase in global requests for account information, content removal, and copyright takedowns. — @policy

As we alluded to in our last post, earlier this year we met with officials from the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Washington to push for our ability to provide greater transparency concerning national security requests. Specifically, if the government will not allow us to publish the actual number of requests, we want the freedom to provide that information in much smaller ranges that will be more meaningful to Twitter’s users, and more in line with the relatively small number of non-national security information requests we receive. We also pressed for the ability to be specific about different kinds of national security requests and to be able to indicate “zero requests” if that applies to any particular category of request.

Unfortunately, we were not able to make any progress at this meeting, and we were not satisfied with the restrictions set forth by the DOJ. So in early April, we sent a draft midyear Transparency Report to DOJ that presented relevant information about national security requests, and asked the Department to return it to us, indicating which information (if any) is classified or otherwise cannot lawfully be published. At this point, over 90 days have passed, and we still have not received a reply… MORE