India accounts for almost 20% of content removal requests to social media platforms

Over the years, social media and technology platforms such as Google, Twitter and Facebook have grown as an alternate world for netizens.

With the growing popularity and their impact, they have also attracted many governments attention across the world over their content, which sometimes alleged to be defamatory, fake and in violation of local laws.

This has also led to an increase in content removal requests.

According to UK-based technology research firm Comparitech, India is at the top of the table on takedown requests with 19.86% (77,620) of the total requests. It was followed by Russia, which also had about 19.75% (77,162) takedown requests.

A huge number of Indian govt content removal requests were sent to social media giant Facebook, which is said to have over 300 million users in India.

Since July 2013, India has sent about 70,815 content removal requests to the social platform.

Earlier, Facebook, in its transparency report, had revealed that it restricted 17,700 pieces of content in response to legal requests from MeitY and court orders in the second half of 2018 (July-December period).

On Google, the most number of takedown requests, mostly on published blogpost around conspiracy theory, was sent by Russia 53% (61,471), India with 5308 requests stood at fifth number.

Whereas on Twitter, Turkey led with the most number of content removal request about 30K. India with 1406 takedown requests was fourth largest.

Meanwhile, observers and experts see the increasing requests for removal of content on tech platforms as a move to suppress free speech.

Some governments avidly try to control online data, whether this is on social media, blogs, or both, said Paul Bischoff, an editor at Comparitech.

The development is taking place at a time when the Indian government has been actively monitoring tech platforms contents.

In the last couple of years, it has asked these tech giants to place a system to curb the practice of uploading misleading content.