The devil's in the data

Are governments across the world getting increasingly paranoid? Twitter saw a 40 per cent increase worldwide in government requests for user data over the last six months of 2014, according to the company's latest transparency report. The US government and Turkey led the world with 56 per cent (down from last year's 61 per cent) and 12 per cent of all requests respectively. But Turkey led the world when it came to requests to remove tweets. In that category, Turkey's requests increased 156 per cent to a total of 477. Overall, during 2014, governments made 4,929 requests for user information. In 2013, that number was 2,567.