India has become the top country to order the removal of Facebook posts from the social media platform, says a report by Facebook Inc.
According to a new report prepared by Facebook, requests from the Indian government to take down the content on Facebook had trebled in the first six months of 2015,
Facebook Inc said that the content restrictions and government requests to obtain users’ data surged across the globe in the first half of 2015.
The social media giant had claimed to have removed the most number of posts- 15,155- after the centre;s Modi government requested them to do so because they were deemed to have violated the local Indian laws.
In Turkey the same number stood at 4,496-up from 3,624 in 2014- following the government’s intervention.
On requests for personal users’ data, the Facebook said that most government requests were related to criminal cases, such as robberies or kidnappings. it added that the governments across the world usually requested for basic subscriber information, IP addresses or account content, including people’s posts online.
The bulk of government requests on personal data came from US law enforcement agencies. US agencies requested data from 26,579 accounts – comprising more than 60% of requests globally – up from 21,731 accounts in the second half of 2014.
France, Germany and Britain also made up a large percentage of the requests and had far more content restricted in 2015. Some of the content taken down in Germany, for example, were related related to Holocaust denial.
The technology industry has pushed for greater transparency on government data requests, seeking to shake off concerns about their involvement in vast, surreptitious surveillance programmes revealed by former spy agency contractor Edward Snowden.
“Facebook does not provide any government with ‘back doors’ or direct access to people’s data,” the Facebook report said.