Turkey leads the world in Twitter censorship - and no other country is even close
Every six months, Twitter issues a transparency report that explains how many government takedown requests it received during the period and how it responded to those requests.
For the first six months of 2015, Turkey led the way. As this chart compiled by Statista shows, more than 70% of government takedown requests came from Turkish authorities - the company received 408 court orders and another 310 requests from government authorities to remove content "based on violations of personal rights and other local laws." That's more than ten times as many as second place, Russia, which issued zero court orders and 68 official requests.
Turkey has led the world in this dubious honor ever since the first half of 2014. In March of that year, the government temporarily banned Twitter as its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, battled a corruption scandal.
