NEW DELHI: Facebook recently released its “Global Government Requests Report” that provides an insight into government requests to Facebook for user data and content restrictions. India, unsurprisingly, is very high on the list of such requests, second only to the United States of America.

Organised in six month intervals, the data available is from July - December 2015, January - June 2015, July - December 2014, January - June 2014, July - December 2013, and January to June 2013.

In addition to being far ahead of other countries (barring the US) in government requests to Facebook for data, India has seen an upward increase in the numbers of such requests. Further, in terms of content restrictions, India has seen a huge increase in the number of pieces of content restricted from 2013 and 2014 to 2015. Whereas content restrictions were around 5000 pieces in the intervals in 2013 and 2014, this figure jumped three times to roughly 15,000 pieces of content restricted in each interval of 2015. This is despite the fact that the IT act was amended by the Supreme Court in 2015.

Interestingly, other than the most recent interval of July - December 2015 where France led the content restrictions tally, India has been far, far ahead of other countries in the number of pieces of content restricted (side note: The only reason France overtook India in this time period was because of "32,100 instances of a single image related to the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris that was alleged by OCLCTIC to violate French laws related to the protection of human dignity")

For instance, in the first six months of 2015, India led this tally with 15,155 pieces of content restricted. No other country came close, with the closest being Turkey at 4496 pieces of content restricted. In comparison, the United Kingdom only restricted 8 pieces of content; Germany 188; France 296 and the United States, 0.

This has been the trend in preceding intervals as well. In July - December 2014, for instance, India again led the tally of the number of pieces of content restricted at 5832. Turkey came in at 3624 but no other country crossed 100 pieces of content restricted (the UK was 3; Germany 60; France 13; the US, 0).

In the most recent period, July - December 2015, India made 5561 total requests for data and 7018 users/accounts were requested.


Further, in terms content restrictions, 14, 971 number of pieces of content were restricted in the same period. Facebook notes: “We restricted access in India to categories of content in response to legal requests from government agencies, including law enforcement agencies. We also restricted access to content in categories these agencies have identified as illegal that have been brought to our attention by non-government entities, such as NGOs and members of the Facebook community. The majority of the content was restricted as alleged anti-religious and hate speech that could cause unrest and disharmony within India.


January - June 2015, 5115 total requests for data were made by the Indian government and 6,268 users/accounts were requested.


15,155 pieces of content was restricted.


July - December 2014, 5,473 total requests for data were made by the Indian government and 7281 users/accounts were requested.


5,832 number of pieces of content was restricted.


January - June 2014, 4,559 total requests for data were made by the Indian government and 5,958 users/accounts were requested.


4,960 number of pieces of content was restricted.


July - December 2013, 3,598 total requests for data were made by the Indian government and 4,711 users/accounts were requested.


4,765 number of pieces of content was restricted.


January - June 2013, 3,245 total requests for data were made by the Indian government and 4,144 users/accounts were requested.


Get the details here: https://govtrequests.facebook.com/#

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YASH SHARMA