The Indian government made as many as 315 requests for Twitter account information between July and December 2017, up from 261 between January and June, and asked the micro-blogging site to remove 142 accounts, up from 102, during the corresponding period. There were two account removal requests by courts too, according to Twitter’s 12th bi-annual Transparency Report that was released late Thursday.

The report said the company withheld content in 3 per cent of the account removal requests from the Indian government/police and courts.

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In the 315 account information requests from India, Twitter “produced some information” in 15 per cent cases, said the report.

“This data includes the number of government requests received for account information, as well as the percentage of requests we complied with in whole or in part from India,” the micro-blogging site said in its report. Twitter said the data also included government requests, “and other complaints of illegal content from authorised reporters” received to remove or withhold content on Twitter from India.

India was among the top ten countries with most number of account information requests from the government.

Twitter defines the “government information requests” as requests issued by law enforcement and other government agencies.

According to the report, the United States was the top requester again, submitting 28 per cent of total government information requests. The percentage of requests from the US, however, decreased dramatically since 2012 when it accounted for 80 per cent of the global information requests received by Twitter.

On the second position was Japan, submitting 24 per cent of the total information requests.

Among the other countries on the top are United Kingdom (12%), Turkey (8%), France (5.7%), India (5.1%) and Germany (4%).

Between July 1, 2017, and December 31, 2017, a total of 274,460 accounts were permanently suspended for violations related to the promotion of terrorism. “This is down 8.4% from the volume shared in the previous reporting period and is the second consecutive reporting period in which we’ve seen a drop in the number of accounts being suspended for this reason,” said the Twitter report.

Overall, since August 2015, over 1.2 million accounts have been removed globally that promoted terrorism.

“Of those 274,460 accounts suspended in the last reporting period, 93% were flagged by internal, proprietary tools, and 74% of those accounts were suspended before their first Tweet. Government reports of violations related to the promotion of terrorism represent less than 0.2% of all suspensions in the most recent reporting period and reflect a 50% reduction in accounts reported compared to the previous reporting period,” said the report.

Twitter updated its in-product messaging about ‘withheld content’ in December 2017 to more precisely explain the reason for withholding. “Subsequently, we began to differentiate between legal demands (e.g., court orders) and reports based on local law(s) (e.g., reports alleging the illegality of content in a particular country). These changes are now reflected in this latest Transparency Report, which includes details about removal requests from trusted reporters and non-governmental organizations that we reviewed for potential violations of local law(s),” said the report.