India Has Sent Most Censorship Requests To Social Media Platforms In Last 10 Years

The Indian government is currently in the process of forming policies to regulate social media, both to protect user privacy and to prevent the spread of hoaxes and false news.

But they've been attempting to control social media posts for a long time before this.

Reuters

Back in 2009, Google began tracking the takedown requests it would receive from governments, and releasing those statistics in an annual report. Soon after, other online platforms like Facebook and Twitter began following suit. Now, UK technology research firm Comparitech has gone ahead and analysed all that data, and they have a disturbing picture to paint for you.

When it comes to takedown requests, which is basically a government telling a platform that something needs to be pulled offline, there's one country that leads by a large margin. And it's ours.

According to the Comparitech report. India leads the list of countries with the most-submitted takedown requests in the past decade. That's across multiple major platforms; Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, and Wikimedia

Between July 2009 and July 2018, India submitted a total of 77,620 takedown requests to four of the companies (it didn't submit any to Wikimedia). The second highest on the list was Russia with 77,162. Turkey came in third with a much lower number of 63,585. France and Mexico rounded out the top five with 49,971 and 25,036 respectively.

Comparitech

It's a stark difference between what we think online censorship is like India, and how it really is. About 20 percent of these takedown requests from India came from the government, which is about 15,000 requests. The rest would have likely come from the police, courts, and elsewhere.

That means India is solely responsible for 19.86 percent of the censorship attempts on the biggest social media platforms in the world. And we're pretty much on par with Russia, where 20 percent of the requests came from its government as well.

"Here at Comparitech, we've collated all of this data to find out which governments censor online content the most and which channels are targeted by each government," said Paul Bischoff, an editor at Comparitech.

And when you dive into the nitty gritty, you do get a clearer picture of where India's censorship focus is. For one, we presented no takedown requests to Wikimedia (in fact only two companies did among the list of top 20) and only six to Microsoft in 10 years. We did however have 1,406 requests to send to Twitter and 5,308 to Google.

Comparitech

Most importantly though, India has sent 70,815 takedown requests to Facebook alone in the last decade. That's 91.23 percent of all our requests.

That's insane, considering the next highest number of requests sent to the company was from France, at just 42,989. Russia meanwhile made the list largely thanks to Google, to which it submitted 61,471 takedown requests.

As far as Google goes, we're still 5th on the list of the total number of requests sent. And though our Twitter requests numbered fewer than that, we're still fourth on the list globally.