We are building a culture of transparency for governments, users around the world: Twitter’s Vijaya Gadde

In a first, Twitter has introduced a new metric ‘impressions’ that shows how many times a particular tweet was viewed before it was removed, Gadde said.

Twitter is building a culture of transparency about how it is moderating content for government and users globally through better metrics and third party platforms such as Lumen Database, said Vijaya Gadde, Legal, Public Policy & Trust and Safety Lead at Twitter.

According to Gadde, it is not garnering Twitter friends, either from the government or otherwise and might not make people happy.

In a conversation in Twitter Spaces about the firm’s transparency report for the period between July and December 2020, Gadde said in a first, the firm has introduced a new metric ‘impressions’ that shows how many times a particular tweet was viewed before it was removed.

While most of the tweets were removed when impressions were less than 100, 6 percent tweets had more than 100 views before it was removed.

India was the single largest source of government information requests, accounting for 25 percent of the global volume and 15 percent of the global accounts specified, followed by the US at 22 percent.

Gadde explained that while the take down requests from the government grew to 44 percent, Twitter responded to only 37 percent. Requests raised for removal of content was 42,000, and Twitter responded to only 31 percent of these requests.

Some of these requests were challenged by the microblogging platform. This could be on grounds that the information given was incomplete or accounts were already suspended. Twitter might also have challenged some of the requests because they violated local laws or beyond its scope.

The company, she said, has put in a lot of effort into content moderation and has been accurate. Gadde added they will share more data on content moderation going forward.