India among top nations seeking content removal on social media platforms

Twitter’s co-founder and former boss Jack Dorsey’s latest remark that the platform received “many requests” from the Indian government to block accounts covering farmers’ protests and those critical of the government has sparked a controversy and reignited the debate around content removal on social media in India, particularly after 2014.

Union Minister of State for Information and Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar strongly refuted the charge. Taking to Twitter, the minister said, “This is an outright lie by @jack – perhaps an attempt to brush out that very dubious period of twitters history (sic).” The government may be quick to reject Dorsey’s allegations, but it is a fact that India accounts for a large number of social media post removals.

48,000% increase!

Interestingly, an analysis of Twitter’s global transparency reports by The Indian Express revealed that legal demands made by the Indian government and courts to remove content from the social media platform increased by 48,000% between 2014 and 2020.

Also read: IT rules for social media content: Centre extends deadline for feedback

In the same period, the number of content-blocking orders given to social media companies by the government increased by approximately 1,991%, data shared with Parliament showed, according to the newspaper. Minister of State for Electronics and IT Sanjay Dhotre said the Union government had asked social media firms to remove 9,849 links from their platforms under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act in 2020. In 2014, the government had made 471 such requests.

According to Twitter’s transparency reports, India had requested the microblogging platform to remove 12,373 posts, of which over 9,000 requests were made in 2020. In the first six months of 2021, India had asked Twitter to take down 4,900 tweets. This coincided with the government in February 2021 asking Twitter to remove hundreds of accounts that criticised it for its handling of the large-scale farmer protests which started in November 2020.

Similarly, requests from the Indian government to remove content from various Google products nearly doubled in 2021 and touched an all-time high, according to the bi-annual Google transparency report. In 2021, Google released data pertaining to content-removal requests by governments for 99 countries. India was ranked third, after Russia and South Korea, with a 7% share.

Another report in 2021 said India was in the second spot for requesting content removal from social media platforms. Russia topped the list of the 10 countries, with 179,013 content removals requested. India accounted for 24% of requests Facebook received from across the globe when it came to a specific platform, showed a study.

Also read: Twitter moves court against govt orders on blocking of content

In the report, Comparitech said, “Facebook received 3,08,434 content removal requests from the governments. India made up for most of these, with its 74,674 requests accounting for nearly 25% of the total. Most of India’s requests (40%) were made in 2015, when 30,126 requests were submitted. Since then, India’s requests had remained much lower, only reaching two or three thousand per year, except for in 2018 when requests spiked again at just over 19,000.”

Seeking account info

In a recent blog post, Twitter disclosed that India was one of the leading countries to request content removal on the social media platform last year. The company shared statistics on its health and safety measures and revealed that it had received roughly 53,000 legal requests from governments worldwide to take down content between January and June 2022. India, the US, France, Japan, and Germany were the top five countries that requested account information from the platform.

The scenario was no different in 2021 when India made the highest number of legal demands globally to remove content posted by verified journalists and news outlets on Twitter during July-December 2021.

In its transparency report, the micro-blogging platform said India was only behind the US in seeking Twitter account information, accounting for 19 percent of global information requests. It was among the top five countries to issue content-blocking orders to Twitter during July-December 2021 for all kinds of users, it said.

Also read: Govt asked to block 14K accounts, 175 tweets between Feb 2021-22: Twitter tells HC

Twitter said 349 accounts of verified journalists and news outlets worldwide were subject to 326 legal demands to remove content, a 103 percent increase in accounts since the previous period (January-June 2021). “This spike is largely attributed to legal demands submitted by India (114), Turkey (78), Russia (55), and Pakistan (48),” it said. India had topped this list for January-June 2021 as well, as it had made 89 of the total 231 such demands the platform received globally.

At the time of COVID, too, the government had passed an emergency order asking Twitter to censor 52 tweets pertaining to the pandemic. Twitter disclosed this on the Lumen database. As per a report by MediaNama, the censored tweets included posts by MP Revanth Reddy, filmmakers Vinod Kapri and Avinash Das, actor Vineet Kumar Singh and West Bengal minister Moloy Ghatak.