India was one of the top countries to have made legal requests to remove content from Twitter between January and June last year, the social media company said on Tuesday.

“Around the world, Twitter received approximately 53,000 legal requests to remove content from governments during the reporting period [January - June 2022],” Twitter said in a blog post. “Twitter’s compliance rate for these requests varied by requester country. The top requesting countries were Japan, South Korea, Turkey and India.”

India was also among the top countries that requested information for user data last year. “The top five requesting countries seeking account information in H1 2022 [first half of 2022] were India, the United States, France, Japan, and Germany,” the American technology company said.

Twitter’s 20th Transparency Report shared last year had revealed that India submitted the highest number of demands to remove tweets by verified handles of journalists and news outlets between July and December 2021. India had made a total of 3,992 legal demands to remove content from Twitter, including those posted by journalists and news outlets.

On April 12, Musk had acknowledged that India’s rules for social media companies were quite strict. The SpaceX founder said that his company would rather comply with the social media laws in India than risk its employees going to jail.

Since world’s richest person Elon Musk took over the company, Twitter has undergone some sweeping changes. Last week, the social media company started removing the blue tick icons that were a mark of verification of users’ identity on the platform.

The blue tick, which was so far seen as a mark of authenticity of profiles of celebrities, journalists, other prominent figures, organisations and government bodies, will now be available to any user who pays a monthly subscription fee of $8 (over Rs 650).