Governments around the world are getting more and more panicky over perceived anti-government posts over at Twitter. And this panic, in return, has pressured the microblogging company to unfortunately release its users' very private informations.

Twitter said that in just the span of the first two quarters of this year alone, in the wake of the NSA scandal, it received 1,157 requests for information about users of the short message service from law-enforcement agencies from the U.S., Australia and other foreign governments.

A total of 36 countries were included in Twitter's Transparency Report released this week. The top three governments from which most requests for private data came from were the U.S, Japan and Australia, in that order.

  • U.S. authorities asked Twitter for information on 1,319 users
  • Japan authorities asked Twitter for information on 103 users
  • Australian authorities asked Twitter for information on 58 users

Others in the list include Brazil, France and the UK.

Not only requests for private data information jumped this year but also efforts to censor content.

"Over the last six months, we have gone from withholding content in two countries to withholding content (ranging from hate speech to defamation) in seven countries," Jeremy Kessel, Twitter legal policy manager, said.

Russia gave the highest amount of content or accounts removal requests from government agencies at 17. This was followed by France and Germany, both at three.

As to the number of content or accounts removal requests by court orders, Brazil gave the highest. The judicial system in that country, on nine different occasions, issued specific orders to remove defamatory tweets amounting to 39.