Google India Removed 6.47 Lakh Content Pieces In September 2022

US-based tech giant Google took down a total of 647,177 content pieces/URLs in India via automatic detection and complaints received from users.

Of the total, it proactively removed 547,431 content pieces to prevent the dissemination of harmful content including child sexual abuse and violent extremist content.

In its September 2022 monthly transparency report, the company revealed that it received 30,753 complaints from individual users in India, of which 93.5% pertained to copyright, 4% to trademark and the rest were over counterfeit, legal, defamatory and impersonation issues.

Taking action against these complaints, Google removed 99,746 content pieces following its community violation guidelines, content policies or local authority regulations. A single complaint can have multiple items, and hence the number of actioned pieces are higher than the number of complaints.

94% of these content pieces were taken down owing to copyright infringement and 5.8% to trademark infringement.

In August, Google received 37,282 complaints, actioned 1,38,332 content pieces based on these complaints and 5,51,659 pieces of content based on automatic detection.

On a related note, Google is facing increased scrutiny from India’s competition watchdog CCI. Google was fined INR 2,274 Cr for abusing its market dominance and anti-competitive practices.  It has also pulled back the enforcement of the in-app billing policy in India for now.

India’s IT Rules for digital intermediaries mandates social media platforms with more than 5 Mn users to publish monthly compliance reports. Thus, besides Google, Meta, Twitter, WhatsApp, Sharechat and others also publish monthly compliance reports.

WhatsApp banned 2.6 Mn accounts in September 2022 while Twitter took down 54K+ accounts and actioned 134 posts between August 26, 2022, and September 25, 2022.

In September 2022, Meta actioned 3.37 Cr Facebook and Instagram posts – 3.07 Cr posts on Facebook and 30 Lakh posts on Instagram. It received 587 complaints through the grievance mechanism, of which ‘account has been hacked’ was the top reason for the complaints.

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