Google India Removed Over 6 Lakh Content Pieces In June

Global tech giant Google has released its monthly compliance report for June 2022, where it has taken removal actions against 6,40,339 content pieces that violated community guidelines.

In total, the company has received 32,717 complaints from Indian users during the month. The complaints are related to third-party content that is believed to violate local laws or personal rights on Google’s significant social media intermediary (SSMI) platform, it said.

The complaints received by Google are spread across various categories including infringement of intellectual property rights, violation of local laws prohibiting types of content on several grounds including defamation.

In June, Google received the highest number of complaints for copyright issues (96.1%). Other compalints were related to trademark, defemation, counterfiet and graphic sexual content.

Based on the user complaints, Google took removal actions against 1,11,493 content pieces that violated community guidelines. The content removal actions were mostly related to copyright infringement (99.2%).

“When we receive complaints from individual users regarding allegedly unlawful or harmful content, we assess each item to determine if the content violates our Community Guidelines or content policies, or meets local legal requirements for removal,” Google said.

In addition to user complaints, Google also took removal actions against 528,846 pieces of content as part of its automated detection.

As social media intermediaries with more than 5 Mn users are mandated to publish monthly compliance reports under new IT rules 2021, other platforms have also released their reports for June.

For example, Meta took action against 22.8 Mn content pieces on its Facebook and Instagram platforms in June; 18.7 Mn pieces for Facebook and 4.1 Mn pieces for Instagram. 

In addition, ShareChat also took down around 2.6 Mn content pieces in June, while it received more than 5 Mn (5,227,860) user reports during the month.