“Elon Musk’s Twitter Compliance with Government Requests: Insight into the Restriction of Free Speech Laws”

A number speaks volumes: since Elon Musk took over as head of Twitter in October 2022, he has complied with almost all of the 971 government or government requests to remove or tag. of courts – requests whose number has continued to increase in recent years. The social network complied fully with 808 of them and partially with 154 of them. It is not known what happened to the other 9.

These requests concern either the deletion of tweets, or the transmission of information on anonymous accounts, in order to identify them. The majority of recent government solicitations have come from countries that have passed laws restricting free speech, such as india, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. Two hundred and fifty-five requests nevertheless come from Germany, a State which in 2017 adopted a online hate and extremism law.

Open bar for dictators

The former management of Twitter, under the leadership of the jurist Vijaya Gadde –fired early on by Elon Musk, who denounced her as a horrible censor–, generally refused to fully comply with the demands of authoritarian regimes. This led in particular to the blocking of the application in Türkiye in 2014after the blue bird network refused to censor corruption charges targeting a former minister.

“In January, India’s Ministry of Information ordered Twitter to remove all posts sharing footage from a BBC documentary on Prime Minister Narendra Modī. Dozens of positions have been eliminated, including that of a local deputy”recalls journalist Russell Brandom of Rest of world.

If the complete denial of state or judicial requests has always been exceptional at Twitter, the rule that prevailed until now was rather to comply partially, but not completely. However, under Elon Musk, the percentage of requests fully accepted exploded, from 50% to 83%. The end of an era.