Skip to footer

Google says content removal requests are way up in Russia, Brazil

In its seventh annual transparency report, Google drew special attention to Russia and Brazil, where new laws pertaining to Internet content have yielded a flood of removal requests. 

|
Reuters
Russian President Vladimir Putin takes part in a live nationwide phone-in in Moscow, on April 25, 2013. Google said today that it was receiving an increasing amount of content removal requests from the Russian government.
  • By Matthew Shaer

From July to December of 2012, Google received a record number of content removal requests, both from the United States government and countries such as Russia and Brazil.

In a transparency report issued today, Google's legal director, Susan Infantino, noted that 2,285 government requests were issued in the second half of last year, up steeply from 1,811 requests in the six months prior. This is the seventh transparency report released by Google, Infantino added. 

"As we’ve gathered and released more data over time, it’s become increasingly clear that the scope of government attempts to censor content on Google services has grown," Infantino wrote in the report. "In more places than ever, we’ve been asked by governments to remove political content that people post on our services. In this particular time period, we received court orders in several countries to remove blog posts criticizing government officials or their associates."

Infantino drew special attention to a big spike in requests from Brazil (697 requests) and Russia (114 requests), two countries that recently enacted laws pertaining to the availability of Internet content. (Users interested in finding out which requests Google complied with – and which they fought, successfully or not, in court – can be found here.) 

Of course, as Jeff John Roberts notes over at GigaOM, Google isn't the only tech titan to publish a regular transparency report. According to Twitter, from January of 2012 to January of 2013, the company received 1,858 information requests, 48 removal requests, and 6,646 copyright notices. The microblogging platform has also published a dedicated repository for this kind of data, which can be accessed at transparency.twitter.com.

Looking for a Facebook transparency report of requests from governments?

Good luck. It doesn't exist. 

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Google says content removal requests are way up in Russia, Brazil
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2013/0425/Google-says-content-removal-requests-are-way-up-in-Russia-Brazil
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe