Facebook Transparency Report: India Leads With 4765 Content Pieces Blocked

According to Facebook Transparency report released for 6 month period between July-December 2013 shows that India leads all the countries in the world when it comes to blocking of content.

4765 pieces of content on Facebook put up by Indians were blocked during the 6 month period. The report says that these content pieces were restricted primarily on the request of law enforcement officials and the India Computer Emergency Response Team under local laws prohibiting criticism of a religion or the state.

Between July and December 2013, Indian Govt and law enforcement agencies made 3598 requests to Facebook, that referenced 4711 users or accounts. Among all the requests, 53.56% of requests produced some data.

The number of requests made by Indian Govt. were second highest after United States, who made 12,598 user data requests that referenced 18,715 user accounts. However, not a single content piece was blocked by Facebook for any of the requests made by U.S

In the first half of 2013, Indian Govt agencies made 3245 requests for details on 4144 accounts from India.

When does Facebook provide User Data?

Even if the request is come from senior government authorities, Facebook needs to have a letter from court of law to furnish any of the user data.

Colin Stretch, Facebook’s General counsel, had previously that “We believe this process protects the data of the people who use our service, and requires governments to meet a very high legal bar with each individual request in order to receive any information about any of our users. We scrutinize each request for legal sufficiency under our terms and the strict letter of the law, and require a detailed description of the legal and factual bases for each request. We fight many of these requests, pushing back when we find legal deficiencies and narrowing the scope of overly broad or vague requests.”