Twitter is extremely popular in Turkey with 12 million users in a nation of nearly 75 million - the total Twitter user population is 288 million, according to the Financial Times.

Overall, Twitter said demands by countries for content removal from the microblogging website were up by 40 per cent in the last six months of 2014.

The decision to block Twitter in March 2014 came after audio recordings allegedly revealed corruption among those close to Recep Tayyip Erdoan, the then Turkish prime minister. They had been widely shared on Twitter.

It was a tense period ahead of the country's local elections and despite the outrage and upset the ban caused, the leading Justice and Development Party (AKP) won the majority of votes. Mr Erdoan became president in August.

Recep Tayyip Erdoan with a picture of Ataturk, the father of the Turkish republic (Reuters)

According to Twitter's report, the United States topped a list of countries' governments requesting account information - Turkey came second with 356 requests made and in the UK, 116 requests were made.

Meanwhile, more than 90 per cent of tweets withheld after requests from authorities, courts and others, were made in Turkey. A total of 1,982 tweets were withheld, 1,820 within Turkey.

The report had been released on Friday but appeared to be premature, and was removed. The full report was published on Monday and shows an increase in removal requests in total.

Facebook's transparency report for the first half of 2014 further illustrates the attack on freedom of expression online in Turkey. 1,893 pieces were successfully censored in Turkey and only India was higher with 4,960 pieces.

Since the Gezi protests in the summer of 2013 and the breakdown in relations between exiled preacher Fethullah Gulen and Mr Erdoan, individuals' right to freedom of expression is more limited, especially for journalists.

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Turkey's crackdown on freedom of speech intensifies