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Facebook's Transparency Report Reveals Where Governments Censor Citizens

India, Pakistan, Turkey, Germany, and France had the largest number of content takedown requests.
Image: Facebook

The United States easily leads the world in the number of requests it makes to groups like Facebook and Google for user information, but it never asks social media sites to take content down (part of that whole First Amendment thing). It’s not like that everywhere, though. India, Pakistan, Turkey, Israel, Germany, and France forced Facebook to take down more content than anywhere else in the world, according to the company’s new Global Government Requests Report.

Like Google started doing a couple years ago, Facebook is now, in the name of transparency, letting users know which countries most often try to interfere with the social network. Sometimes, that means a country asks Facebook for messages and IP addresses when it relates to a government investigation. On that front, the United States easily led the world, making 12,598 such requests in the second half of 2013. That number was roughly the same as it was during the first half of the year.

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With what we know about PRISM and the country’s obsession with gathering as much data as possible on its citizens, that should come as no surprise (not that it should be ignored), so it’s worth focusing on a new set of data: Content restrictions.

Facebook says that its “mission is to give people the power to share, and to make the world more open and connected. Sometimes, the laws of a country interfere with that mission, by limiting what can be shared there.”

Local and national laws in India and Turkey were particularly restrictive in the second half of last year: Facebook removed 4,765 pieces of content posted by users in India, “reported primarily by law enforcement officials and the India Computer Emergency Response Team under local laws prohibiting criticism of a religion or the state.” Turkey has tried its best to censor the internet all year—trying to push through bans on Twitter and YouTube. But the country also forced Facebook to take down 2,014 pieces of content, which were primarily related to “local laws prohibiting defamation or criticism of Ataturk or the Turkish state.”

Meanwhile, Germany and France asked Facebook to remove 84 and 80 pieces of Holocaust denial posts, respectively; Australia asked Facebook to remove 48 pieces of content that were illegal under local anti-discrimination laws; and three pieces of content were removed in the United Kingdom as a response to court injunctions.

“When we receive a government request seeking to enforce those laws, we review it with care, and, even where we conclude that it is legally sufficient, we only restrict access to content in the requesting country,” Facebook said.

The United States made no content removal requests. There’s the First Amendment for you. Facebook’s whole report is worth digging into.