Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, defends platform's compliance with government censorship requests
Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, has stated that Twitter has "no actual choice" about complying with government censorship requests.
This comes after Musk has faced criticism for appearing to censor speech on the platform, including removing some accounts and tweets at the behest of the Turkish government ahead of their elections.
Musk has previously stated that Twitter would allow all legal speech and would be reluctant to delete things, but recent events have led to a change in approach.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
In the past, the platform has complied with a majority of government takedown requests and has been criticized for not fighting them in court.
However, prior to Musk's takeover, Twitter frequently fought such requests and publicly released information about them.
Twitter received over 47,000 removal requests between July and December 2021, and complied with 51% of them.
In many cases, when it complied with a removal request because of a certain country's laws, it removed the violating content only in that country, rather than globally.