Part of the promise of Twitter 2.0 was that the new version of the social media platform would be a bastion of free speech.
Musk's boosters often say that the billionaire spent $44 billion -- the amount he purchased Twitter for -- to protect free speech. He himself says the same thing.
But the truth is that Twitter is complying with more government demands for censorship now than it ever did before Musk took the company over.
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According to self-reported data, since Musk took ownership of the company, Twitter has received 971 government censorship demands, fully complying with 808 of them.
Before Musk, Twitter fully complied with about 50%, while partially complying with many more.
The requests included orders to remove controversial posts, and demands that Twitter produce private data to identify anonymous accounts, tech news site Rest of World reported.
Twitter self-reports its takedown notices to the Lumen database, an independent research project that studies the takedown notices and other legal removal requests and demands concerning online content.
According to the list, which is available to view here, Twitter has not once refused to comply at least partially with the government requests -- the vast majority of which came from Turkey with a significant portion coming from India, Germany, Brazil and France -- since Musk took over on October 27, 2022.
Governments are starting to catch on too, with take down requests at Twitter during the first six months of the year more than doubling to 971 from 348 a year ago.
Since April 15, Twitter has stopped self-reporting to Lumen.
