Google Removed 93,550 Content Pieces In August, Received 35,191 User Complaints

Google has removed a total of 93,550 content pieces in India based on user complaints between August 1 to August 31, 2021. 

Complying with Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code Rules, the US tech major in its recent compliance report revealed that of the 93,550 content pieces taken down, 99.1% were related to copyright infringement and remaining were for trademark infringement. 

Interestingly, according to its last month’s compliance report which captured information between July 1 to July 30, 2021, Google had removed 95,680 user content pieces. For the month of June, Google had removed 83,613 and 71,132 content pieces in June and May respectively. 

Google said that it removes a content after evaluating the content based on Google’s community guidelines, content policies and/or legal policies. Based on this review, removal action may be taken by the company.

Apart from user complaints, Google has also taken removal actions against 651,933 pieces of content during the month of August based on its automation detection technology. As per Google, ‘removal actions’ number represents the number of items where a piece of content was removed or restricted during the one-month reporting period as a result of a specific complaint. 

The tech mammoth relies on automation detection technology to prevent the dissemination of harmful content such as child sexual abuse material and violent extremist content. Last month, it had removed 576,892 content based on its automation detection technology. 

In the month of August, Google India received a total of 35,191 complaints from users, of which 96.2% were for copyright infringement, 1.2% were for defamation, 1.1% were for trademark infringement, 1.1% for other legal reasons, and others. 

Couple of days ago, popular messaging platform WhatsApp released its compliance report, where it revealed that it had banned 2 Mn Indian accounts in August, a fall of 1 Mn from the 3 Mn Indian accounts it had banned between June 15 and July 31, 2021. 

WhatsApp received 420 user reports spanning across account support (105), ban appeal (222), other support (34), product support (42) and safety (17) during August. The platform, however, “actioned” 41 accounts i.e. took remedial actions such as banning or restoring a previously banned account.