In this age of social media use, governments all over the world have seen the need to get information from social networking sites about certain individuals or groups. It could be due to a criminal investigation or any other reason and this leads them to ask these social networks if they could get information from them. If the information is deemed crucial by the social networks, they give out the information and they end up logging all this data and presenting them in a transparency report which they usually do bi-annually.
Twitter is a big social network in its own right with over 300 million active monthly users and they are bombarded with requests from governments. They have been releasing these transparency reports for 4 years now and this is the latest one for the first half of this year.
In general, they received 2% more government requests for account information and 8% more accounts as compared to the same time last year. They grouped this data according to the various countries and of course Kenya is listed.
According to the data, Kenyan authorities asked for account information for one account and Twitter compiled by giving out some information. However, Twitter did not approve of the removal request. Compared to the same period last year, they did not provide information to the one account that was requested by authorities. An interesting aspect about the data about Kenya is that Twitter received an “emergency disclosure request” from Kenyan authorities which according to them involves an “exigent emergency that involves the danger of death or serious physical injury to a person that Twitter may have information necessary to prevent.”
