India Tops The List Of Requests Made For Blocking Content On Facebook


NEWDELHI: The Indian law enforcement agencies together with Indian computer Emergency Response Team and government officials made a request to Facebook, in order to block content in 4,765 instances mentioning violation of rules like censuring a religion or the state.

As per the data from the second Government Requests Report by the California- headquartered firm, India made the biggest request for blocking content followed by Turkey (2014), Pakistan (162), Israel (113), Germany (84) and France (80).

 On blocking content, Facebook said: “We restricted access in India to a number of pieces of content reported primarily by law enforcement officials and the ICERT under local laws prohibiting criticism of a religion or the state.”

 Facebook’s report also revealed that India made the second largest number of user requests at 3,598 after the US, which sought information on about 12,598 Facebook users in the second half of 2013. In India — which accounts for over 100 million Facebook users, second only to the US — law enforcement entities made 3,598 requests for information on 4,711 users in the last six months of 2013, Facebook said.

 In total, Facebook received more than 28,000 government data requests during July-December 2013. Following requests from the US and India were that of the UK (1,906 requests), Italy (1,699), Germany (1,687) and France (1,661). It said governments they may contact firms (like Facebook) to restrict access to content on the Internet that it believes violates their laws. “Requests are scrutinized to determine if the specified content does indeed violate local laws. If, after a thorough legal analysis, we determine content appears to violate local law, then we make it unavailable in the relevant country or territory,” it added.

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Source: PTI