In many countries social media, Twitter included, has become an important medium for political debate and commentary.

Of course, such open discussion is not always popular with the Authorities or with some elements of society.  Just last month,  we all read with horror of the brutal murder of US-Bangladesh blogger Avijit Roy.  In other countries, social media is censored and even blocked; early last year I wrote about Turkey’s temporary closure of Twitter.

Twitter has just published its latest transparency report, which reports on the extent to which some countries attempt to control what messages are spread across this social network.  It makes very interesting reading – content removal requests in the last half of 2014 were up 80% on the previous 6 months.  The table below shows which authorities make the most requests.

Statistics courtesy of Statista

You’ll note that Turkey filed more requests than all other countries put together.  These numbers represent requests made not accepted, and Twitter does refuse many requests after its own investigations.  They reported that in the period covered by this chart, they granted only 13% of requests, though they granted 50% of Turkish requests, many after battles with the Turkish courts.

It’s amazing how 140 characters can seem so threatening to some.  And regardless of the rights and wrongs of these individual cases, this serves as a reminder to us all that online can be monitored and controlled.  By all means embrace the new, but don’t let go of everything old.  Don’t completely replace the printed word with the screen; don’t completely replace cash with plastic.  Freedom and independence are hard to win and easy to lose.