Official ‘requests’ to remove offensive content on Google properties

Posted by Prashant on Dec 9, 2011 in Social Media News | 1 comment

Google received ‘requests’ from the government of India to remove more than 350 items from its various services like Orkut and YouTube, according to media reports. The internet search giant during the January-June 2011 period had no less than 255 removal requests, citing unfair government criticism as the cause, revealed the Google Transparency Report.

The officials had asked it to remove 19 items from YouTube and close to 240 items from Orkut for the same reason, the report added. Other reasons for such requests included privacy/ security (20 requests), defamation (39 requests), hate speech (8 requests), impersonation (14 requests), national security (1 request) and pornography (3 requests).

As much as half of these were fully or partially complied with, something that assumes significance in face of the controversy over the need for social networking sites’ content screening expressed by Kapil Sibal, the Communications and IT Minister. He asked them to do away with derogatory and inflammatory texts on political leaders and religion. The Google Transparency Report informed:

“We declined the majority of these requests and only locally restricted videos that appeared to violate local laws prohibiting speech that could incite enmity between communities. In addition, we received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove 236 communities and profiles from Orkut (Google’s social networking site) that were critical of a local politician. We did not comply with this request, since the content did not violate our community standards or local law.”

Google had requests from both the local and the state law enforcement agencies for removing YouTube videos, which showed protests against leaders or comprised ‘offensive’ language about religious leaders.

In the same period, china made requests to remove 121 items from the Google services. The latter did remove ads, which violated its AdWords policies in response, but refused to comply otherwise.