Russian Government has increased its demand to delete tweets which are anti Putin, by almostย three timesย in last six months
Twitter has started publishing a biannual “Twitter Transparency Report” since July 2012 and is celebrating the third anniversary of the publication. The report focuses on requests received from different governments regarding the account information, content removals and copyright violations. The report also provides an insight into whether any action has been taken by Twitter on these requests.
The latest report which has been published on Monday indicates that though Twitter has received similar request from countries across the world, the requests received from Turkey, Russia and Germany has been up by almost 40 percent against a comparison between the latest consecutive reports.
The transparency report shows a marked increase in the number of content removalย ย requests in comparison to the last report: Turkey 477 , Russia 91 and Germany 43. US too requested for 1622 removal requests and Twitter gave consent toย ย 80 percent of the requests to beย accepted and hence removed the content. However none of the requests from Turkey has been paid any attention to and as per news from a micro blogging site it seems that Turkey blocked the site for more than a week and Turkish citizens could not access the Twitter. Most of these tweets were by the critics against the corruption and government authorities.
The Government of Russian Federation however is the leader as far as the deletion requests are concerned. ย Russia is in a deep internal turmoil over the Ukrainian crisis and anti Putin movements. To add to this there seems to be a severe trust deficit between the Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedevย andย President Vladimir Putin. The already discontentedย Russians are also irritated by economic crisis. Now, if these citizens are voicing their opinions about the Kremlin on Twitter it is being disapproved by the Russian government stating that these are the “revolutionary” comments and could call for protests.
Hence Kremlin has set new rules which would allow the government to restrict their citizens access to such “revolutionary” comments. As mentioned earlier, against a request of 91 content removals from Russian authorities twitter abided by only 13%ย as the restย of the requests were denied to “silence critics of Kremlin”.
In the times of democracy Russian Government is still behaving with hypocritic attitude by denying the claims made byย Twitter in regards to remove the anti Putin content saying that this was done just to maintain law and order in the country. Critics have thoroughly condemned this act ofย Putin, who is being supported by Kremlin.
