Malta requested information on more Facebook accounts in the first six months of the year than any other country in the world on a per capita basis.

According to the Global Government Requests Report, published yesterday by Facebook, the Maltese authorities, particularly the police, requested information on 97 individual accounts. This places Malta at the top of the list of 69 countries, with the equivalent of 242 accounts per million inhabitants.

By contrast, the US – with its massive intelligence gathering operation – only asked for information on 67 accounts per million inhabitants.

The only other countries which come remotely close to Malta, according to the statistics released by Facebook, were Italy (38 accounts per million population) and the UK (37 per million).

In the case of the requests filed by the Maltese authorities, 60 per cent were adhered to. Governments make requests to Facebook seeking account information in official investigations.

According to the social network, the vast majority of such requests relate to criminal cases, such as robberies and kidnappings.

The report states that in many cases, government requests seek basic subscriber information, such as name and length of service.

Other requests may also seek IP address logs or actual account content.

“We scrutinise each request for legal sufficiency under our terms and the strict letter of the law, and require a detailed description of the legal and factual bases of each request,” the report states.

“We fight many of these requests, pushing back when we find legal deficiencies and narrowing the scope of overly broad or vague requests.

“When we are required to comply with a particular request, we frequently share only basic user information, such as name,” the report says.