NEW DELHI: Facebook has restricted access to nearly 1,773 hate contents on social media in the first six months of 2014 on the request of the Pakistani government and other agencies.
Similar steps were taken in Turkey (1,893) and India (5,000) during the period, Facebook said in its Government Requests Report.
During January-June 2014, Facebook said it had received 4,559 requests for information on 5,958 users and accounts. Of this, 50.87 percent of requests saw some data being produced.
Compared to the July-December 2013 period, the number of requests has gone up over 26 percent, while it is higher by 40 percent compared to the same period last year.
Facebook said it received total 15,433 requests for 23,667 users and accounts and 80.15 per cent of requests saw some data being produced. “Since our first report, we’ve seen an increase in government requests for data and for content restrictions. In the first six months of 2014, governments around the world made 34,946 requests for data an increase of about 24 percent since the last half of 2013,” Facebook Deputy General Counsel Chris Sonderby said in a blogpost.
“During the same time, the amount of content restricted because of local laws increased about 19 percent,” he added, “We scrutinise every government request we receive for legal sufficiency under our terms and the strict letter of the law, and push back hard when we find deficiencies or are served with overly broad requests,” he said.
He added that the US-based firm, which has about 1.3 billion users, will continue to work with industry and civil society partners to push governments for additional transparency.
