Twitter accused of responding ‘to tyrants quickly’ but ignoring Australian government

Australian eSafety commissioner Julie Inman Grant told Senate estimates of the ‘very inconsistent the way that [Twitter] are responding to different governments’. Photograph: Bianca de Marchi/AAP

Twitter is being “inconsistent” with its responsiveness to government requests from Australia while complying with orders to block political tweets in Turkey, the Australian eSafety commissioner has said.

Earlier this month, Twitter revealed it had blocked access in Turkey to four accounts and 409 tweets in response to a court order in the lead-up to the country’s elections. The four accounts were critical of the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and reportedly included tweets from an activist, a journalist and a businessman.