Twitter Censored 4.7 Million Tweets in First 6 Months of 2021

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal
Google Cloud/YouTube

Twitter required account holders to delete 4.7 million tweets that allegedly violated the platform’s rules in the first half of 2021, according to the far-left Silicon Valley platform’s latest transparency report — while simultaneously complaining that the “open internet” is “under threat: from authoritarian governments.

On Twitter’s official blog, the company boasts of the large number of allegedly rule-violating tweets it scrubbed from the platform from January 1 to June 30, 2021 — and how few impressions they received.

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal

Via the Twitter blog:

Twitter required account holders to remove 4.7M Tweets that violated the Twitter Rules. Of the Tweets removed, 68% received fewer than 100 impressions prior to removal, with an additional 24% receiving between 100 and 1,000 impressions. In total, impressions on these violative Tweets accounted for less than 0.1% of all impressions for all Tweets during that time period.

The revelations are part of Twitter’s wider transparency report, which includes data on the number of requests for content takedowns and information requests that the company receives from governments and private parties around the world.

According to Twitter, the number of content removal requests is at an all-time high.

In terms of legal demands from governments, in the six month period covered in this report, Twitter received 43,387 legal demands to remove content, specifying 196,878 accounts. This is the largest number of accounts ever subject to removal requests in a reporting period since releasing our first transparency report in 2012.

Of the total global volume of legal demands, 95% originated from only five countries (in decreasing order): Japan, Russia, Turkey, India, and South Korea. We withheld or required account holders to remove some or all of the reported content in response to 54% of these global legal demands.

Despite its policy of steadily-increasing censorship of First Amendment protected content, and its new CEO’s declaration that free speech is not a priority for the company, Twitter closes its transparency report by lamenting that the “Open Internet continues to be under threat around the world.” It does not identify itself as one of the threats to it.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.

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