Twitter says it will engage openly if government asks for tweet removal

Days after Twitter was asked by the government to remove content criticising the handling of the pandemic in India, the company said in the event of receiving additional request to withhold content from the government, it’ll continue to engage openly and constructively keeping alive the spirit of public conversation during a crisis.

“We will also continue to proactively communicate to any affected account and also publish every individual request we receive from the government to the Lumen Database — a level of transparency that is unique in the industry,” Twitter said on Thursday. The firm, however, did not mention the nature of content it had pulled down recently.

Lumen is a project of the Berkman Klein Centre for Internet & Society at Harvard University. The database collects and analyses legal complaints and requests for removal of online materials, making users aware of their rights to know and understand the law. These data enable users to study the prevalence of legal threats and let them see the source of content removals.

The database contains millions of notices, many of them with a valid legal basis, some of them without, and some on the murky border. The database grows by over 40,000 notices per week, with voluntary submissions provided by companies such as Google, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, Medium, and WordPress.

To put the spotlight on credible conversation on the pandemic in India, Twitter has launched a dedicated Covid-19 hub that one can navigate to via the Explore tab where one can find a series of live event pages, public service announcements, debunks and more. It has also rolled out the Covid-19 SOS page that helps surface information from those offering or seeking immediate help during this crisis.