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What govt doesn’t want you to see on Google
Requests from the Indian government to remove content from various Google products nearly doubled in 2021 and touched an all-time high, according to the bi-annual Google transparency report (Photo: Reuters)
Requests from the Indian government to remove content from various Google products nearly doubled in 2021 and touched an all-time high, according to the bi-annual Google transparency report
06 Jul 2022, 01:05 AM IST Rangoli Agrawal, howindialives.com
The number of requests for content removal going from the Indian government to Google is increasing at a fast clip. India is now ranked next only to Russia and South Korea on this count
While Prime Minister Narendra Modi pledged India’s commitment to freedom of speech at a world forum last week, it was a tumultuous time on social media platforms back home. Twitter withheld tweets by journalist Rana Ayyub about the Gyanvapi mosque and blocked three popular accounts linked to protests against the now-scrapped agriculture laws. A tweet by an unidentified user became the basis for a police case against fact-checker Mohammed Zubair. YouTube removed the late singer Sidhu Moose Wala’s song referring to the Sutlej-Yamuna Link canal, citing a government request.
Data released by social media companies shows that the number of requests they get from the Indian government to remove content or to share user information is rising every year. A Plain Facts piece in July 2021 had documented the Twitter numbers, while this piece examines the data for Google.
Requests from the Indian government to remove content from various Google products nearly doubled in 2021 and touched an all-time high, according to the bi-annual Google transparency report. In absolute number of requests, India was next only to Russia and South Korea. YouTube has been the prime target over the years.
Requests to Facebook and Twitter have also increased, similar reports released by them show. Between 2019 and 2021, the number of information requests to Facebook nearly doubled. On Twitter, the number of removal requests grew 7.6 times in 2020, and further doubled during the first half of 2021, as compared to the corresponding period of 2020.
App action
Most removal requests from the Indian government to Google are related to content on YouTube. Between 2011 and 2015, removal requests for YouTube formed 33% of total requests. Between 2016 and 2021, this increased to about 60%. The absolute number of content-removal requests on YouTube has increased from 62 in 2011 to 1,670 in 2021.
For the last two years, the second-largest recipient category of removal requests has been Google’s Play Store. In this period, one of the retaliatory actions taken by India against Chinese acts of aggression on the border has been the banning of Chinese apps. So far, India has banned over 300 Chinese apps in four tranches, beginning July 2020. In absolute terms, the number of content-removal requests on Play Store multiplied from 132 in 2020 to 1,684 in 2021, though it’s not clear how many of these pertained to these banned Chinese apps and how many related to other apps.
Top reasons
Judging by the number of the banned Chinese apps and the reasons for removal, a large number of requests directed at the Google app store appear to relate to other apps. In 2021, about 89% of the government’s app removal requests to Play Store related to ‘impersonation’. According to Google policies, impersonation refers to an app misleading users by appearing similar to someone else’s product in terms of app icons, descriptions, titles, or in-app elements.
In the last 11 calendar years, 2021 was the only year when ‘impersonation’ was the No. 1 reason for content removal across all Google products. Otherwise, it had mostly been ‘defamation’, which was cited as the reason for 26% of all requests made to Google between 2011 and 2021. Roughly, three out of every four defamation requests were related to content on YouTube. Other categories such as obscenity/nudity, privacy and security, and national security accounted for a small share.
In 2021, Google released data pertaining to content-removal requests by governments for 99 countries. India was ranked third, after Russia and South Korea, with a 7% share. At 33,263, the total requests made by the Russian government in 2021 amounted to about nine times that put in by the Indian government.
In the 11 years for which Google has released these reports, four countries have featured in the top 10 list each year. India is one of them, with the others being Brazil, Turkey and the US. There’s a fair amount of stickiness at the top. This is coming from some large-population countries (India, US, Brazil and Russia) as well as from developed countries with relatively smaller populations (France, Germany and UK). Among India’s neighbours, Pakistan has four mentions, while Bangladesh entered the list for the first time in 2021.
See original report here: URL: https://www.livemint.com/politics/policy/what-the-indian-government-wants-google-to-take-down-11657030395914.html
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Content blocking orders by govt and courts to Twitter soar 48,000%
The government ordered social media companies to take down 9,849 links from their platforms under Section 69 (A) of the Information Technology Act, 2000, in 2020, compared to 471 such requests made in 2014, an increase of 1,991 per cent.
Written by Soumyarendra Barik | New Delhi |
Updated: July 11, 2022 4:38:17 pm
According to Twitter’s global transparency reports, between the same time period, India has made legal requests to remove 12,373 pieces of content from the microblogging platform, of which more than 9,000 requests were made in 2020 alone.
There has been a rise of more than 48,000 per cent in legal demands being made by India — from various courts and the government — to remove content from Twitter between 2014 and 2020, an analysis of Twitter’s global transparency reports show. Incidentally, in the same time period, the number of content blocking orders issued to social media companies by the government has also increased by almost 2,000 per cent, data shared with Parliament showed, highlighting the growing trend of online censorship in India.
According to the data shared in the Lok Sabha by former Minister of State for Electronics and IT Sanjay Dhotre, the government ordered social media companies to take down 9,849 links from their platforms under Section 69 (A) of the Information Technology Act, 2000, in 2020, compared to 471 such requests made in 2014, an increase of 1,991 per cent.
According to Twitter’s global transparency reports, between the same time period, India has made legal requests to remove 12,373 pieces of content from the microblogging platform, of which more than 9,000 requests were made in 2020 alone. This places India in the fourth spot to issue blocking orders between 2014 and 2020, after Japan, which made more than 55,000 such requests; Turkey which made close to 50,000 requests; and Russia which ordered removal of more than 36,000 tweets.
Outside of that time frame, in the first six months of 2021, Twitter was asked by various Indian courts and the government to block a little more than 4,900 tweets — this coincided with the company blocking more than 250 accounts in relation to sharing “provocative” tweets over the then ongoing farmers’ protests and the company receiving orders from the government to take down some tweets critical of the government’s handling of Covid-19.
Nearly 2000% rise in Govt blocking orders since 2014
It is worth noting that Twitter in its global transparency reports does not offer a breakdown of legal blocking orders issued by various courts and the government. However, Twitter’s petition against the Ministry of Electronics and IT’s (MeitY’s) blocking orders revealed that between February 2021 and February 2022, the government ordered the company to block more than 1,400 accounts and 175 tweets.
Between 2014 and 2020, the government ordered Google to take down over 9,000 pieces of content from services like Search, YouTube, Gmail, and Bloggr, for reasons like criticism of the government, defamation, adult content, and impersonation among other things, an analysis of the company’s global transparency reports show. Unlike Twitter, Google does offer a breakdown of how many takedown notices were issued to it by the government and how many from the courts.
Also Read | IT Min ordered to take down 1,474 accounts, 175 tweets: Twitter in petition
Incidentally, on Facebook, takedowns have taken a downward trend. For instance, in 2014, the company blocked over 10,000 pieces of content, which further rose to more than 30,000 links being blocked on the platform.
However, in both 2019 and 2020, not more than 2,100 links were blocked on the platform, as per its transparency reports. In these two years, the company took down content following government orders, including content against security of the state and public order.
