Facebook users in India are either sharing too many inflammatory or obscene posts, or the government continues to clamp down on free speech on the Internet. Considering everything being shown in the news, you may be inclined to believe the latter scenario. Well, it’s a shame that the country leads once again in terms of requests for content restrictions on Facebook.
The social networking site’s report for the second half of 2014 shows the US and India in the top two positions in terms of petitions for user data, with 14274 and 5473 requests, respectively. Our government apparently got Facebook to place restrictions 5832 times during this period. On the other hand, Pakistan made fewer demands for content censorship as compared to the first half of last year.
Facebook already claims to have a set of Community Standards it requires users to adhere to while sharing or posting anything to the site. According to these rules, it discourages, deletes and/or encourages people to report incidents of or related to threats, criminal activity, sale of illegal goods, self-harm, hate speech, bullying, attacks on public personalities and more, on the social network.
Also see: India tops Facebook’s global list for content blocking requests
But it is sometimes asked by governments to give up user information or take down content, in spite of this. Facebook insists that it only complies with such orders when a post breaks the local laws governing the concerned nation or poses a security threat. In some of these cases, the company can still choose to make it visible in places outside the borders of the region in which it has been banned.
Between January and June 2014, India made 4960 requests for content restrictions and 4559 demands for user details. As you can see from the numbers mentioned above, we’ve only seen an increase in such applications. The US and Germany made fewer petitions for data in the second half of last year. Overall, Facebook reports an increase from 34946 to 35051 on the subject of account information demands.