The Man demands yet more account information from Twitter

Twitter's transparency report reveals it has received 52 per cent more requests for account information than ever before, affecting 78 per cent more account holders, during the last six months.

The transparency report, which covers the period between January and June 2015, now includes information regarding alleged copyright and trademark violations.

Governments around the world made more requests for information than ever before, affecting 12,711 accounts over the last six months. This is a 52 per cent increase over the last reporting period, in which Twitter states there were 7,144 accounts affected by requests.

Twitter reports that it complied "to some degree" with 58 per cent of these requests.

The title of Great Requester falls to the Lord of the Five Eyes, the United States, which remains the largest source of account information requests.

Over the first half of this year, the US filed more requests than every other nation combined, with a whopping 2,436 requests affecting 6,324 accounts, comprising 56 per cent of all requests received.

Good old Blighty served up seven per cent of the total requests, affecting 1,041 accounts. This is close to a 300 per cent increase on the 371 accounts affected over the previous six months.

Help! Help! I'm being repressed!

Back in January, Twitter (alongside Facebook and Google) complied with the right-wing Turkish government's orders to censor material relating to the country's shenanigans in Syria.

According to that section of the report, Twitter provided no information on the 670 accounts which the Turkish requesters had enquired after. The site did, however, withhold 1,667 tweets and 125 accounts as a result of 408 removal requests.

This level of censorship is not dissimilar to the chatter network's response over the preceding six months, when 1,820 tweets, and 62 accounts, were removed as the result of 328 requests.

Now if only the spooks would provide that kind of detail. ®