Twitter: more and more governments are requesting user data

Twitter as fertile ground for investigation by intelligence agencies and governments worldwide.
This is the scenario – expressed very briefly – that is becoming increasingly clear and evident, year by year.
Twitter’s own headquarters reported this by releasing the results of its annual transparency report.
From the published and disseminated data, it emerged that during the last semester, governments repeatedly requested data from Twitter users.
In total, there were 2,058 official requests from authorities to the relevant social network staff.
The increase compared to last year is evident: in 2013, personal data was requested only 1410 times.
Almost half of the requests made in an entire year, compared to double that in the first half of 2014 alone.
Italy, our country, has also decided to approach Twitter in some cases, but overall the practice does not seem to have consolidated, given that the number of such requests is small: the procedure was initiated only about ten times.
Europe in general has requested information from Twitter on few occasions overall, and more specifically, Great Britain leads the Old Continent with 78 consultations.
In absolute terms, however, the government that has resorted to this practice the most is that of the United States of America, with 1257 requests.
This is the highest number, which far surpasses all other countries that have approached Twitter during specific investigations. In second place is Japan with its 192 “interrogations,” followed by Saudi Arabia with 189.

The reasons for which world governments turn to the respective staff of major social networks – and in this case Twitter, in particular – can be varied: national security is probably the main motivation, but also specific investigations against someone.
This way, they attempt to trace email addresses and IP numbers used to access the web and Twitter.
However, it should be specified that Twitter has not publicly released any data related to national and international security matters in the aforementioned report, as it lacks authorization to disclose these elements.
Naturally, in order to access certain content from Twitter’s database, the competent national authority must submit a specific request, substantiated by the authorization of a judge or court.
Otherwise, the “vaults” of user data of any social network cannot be accessed by anyone.