New Delhi: India has over the last decade sent nearly 20,000 requests, or 5.5 requests per day, to Google to remove content from across its platforms. It ranks third among countries sending the most number of content removal requests to the tech giant, a new study by Surfshark has found.
Surfshark is a Netherlands-based cybersecurity services and Virtual Private Network (VPN) provider. Its services include including data leak detection, private search and personal data removal tools.
According to its report, which was published last month and looked at removal requests from 150 countries between 2013 and 2022, the top reason behind the removals sought by India was “defamation”.
The findings of the study seem to confirm the rising global trend of governments attempting to censor discourse.
More than 3.5 lakh content removal requests were sent to Google from 150 countries in the period examined, of which just six countries (Russia, South Korea, India, Turkey, Brazil and US) account for over 85 percent of the total requests, the Surfshark report noted.
It pointed out that Google receives nearly one lakh requests annually for content removal and that a single request might include multiple items to be removed.
“Government requests for content removal from Google products are rising. Over the last 10 years, the global request count has risen almost 13 times — from 7k to 91k requests per year or from 19 requests per day to 249,” Agneska Sablovskaja, lead researcher at Surfshark, states in the report.
In the rankings, Russia is on top with 2.15 lakh requests to remove content in the 10-year period, followed by South Korea and then India (around 19,600 requests to remove more than 1.1 lakh items in a decade).
Globally, reasons for content removal include violations of local law and court directives, among others. “Also, governments often ask Google to remove political content, citing defamation, privacy, or copyright laws,” the report states.
According to Sablovskaja, national security stands out as the most frequently cited reason by governments seeking the removal of undesirable content.
“A notable increase in content removal requests to Google by governments around the world during times of international conflicts and wars prompts us to consider the balance between genuine interest in a country’s public safety and the potential encroachment into censorship,” Sablovskaja said.
Referring to India, advocates of free speech and digital rights mentioned “political purposes” as likely behind the censorship and called for need for transparency about content removal.
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‘Atmosphere of censorship’
Section 69A of the Information Technology Act gives the government the power to issue directions to block public access to any information under specific conditions, including the interest of sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India and maintaining friendly relations with foreign states. This often leads to periodic take-down requests to platforms.
From India, the top three justifications for content removal requests were defamation (20.1 percent), involving harm to reputation, including claims of libel, slander, and corporate defamation; followed by impersonation (16.3 percent), concerning the malicious usurpation of identity to harm the reputation of a victim; and lastly, privacy and security (8.3 percent) related to claims of violations of an individual user’s privacy or personal information, according to the Surfshark report.
Compared to Bangladesh, India requested eight times more content to be removed over the last decade. Most of the content that India requested for removal was from YouTube (8,800), Google Play (4,300) and Google Search (1,400), noted the report.
Since 2019, the maximum requests to Google for content removal have come in India from the police, court orders, and the information and communications authority, it stated.
“The growing climate of stifling freedom of expression in India had already led to self-censorship,” Apar Gupta, a lawyer serving as executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, a non-profit that advocates for digital rights, told ThePrint. “Self-censorship is pre-dominant here.”
“A wider atmosphere of censorship already exists in India. There are a lot of things that people already don’t post online because they fear online prosecution,” said Gupta.
He further said: “Lokniti-CSDS Status of Policing in India report for 2023 shows that two of three Indians out of a sample size of 10,000 people across 11 states said they feared sharing their religious, political and social views online due to the risk of online prosecution.”
He said that laws impacting content removal in India included the IT rules. “There are government-directed takedowns under Section 69A of the IT Act. The government has started issuing notices for content takedown rather than blocking websites under the IT rules. These website blocking orders are not made public and most often these are not for just one webpage — entire accounts or websites are blocked.”
Gupta added that the most common justification given by the government was that there are more people in India today who access the internet. “There is a fundamental right of people to receive information. So, when any legal order is made to block information, it has to be made public and there should be reasons behind it. We should at least know the websites that have been blocked in India. This can often be done for political purposes.”
Need for transparency
Mishi Choudhary, founder of the Software Freedom Law Centre, termed content removal the “online mechanism of secretly and quietly censoring the net”.
“The law (IT Act) itself is ambiguous in this regard. It provides confidentiality, making it impossible for anyone to know the reasons for content removal and then challenge it,” she told ThePrint.
Rule 16 of the IT Rules, 2021, provides emergency powers to the executive to block access to information on digital platforms, “allowing them to bypass the tests of necessity and proportionality of a blocking request,” she added.
Choudhary further said that there was a need for transparency as the government was able to remove content discreetly. “As the Indian market is so attractive for all companies, we see that they are ready to give away user rights and remove content as they want to continue operating in the market,” she explained.
Laxmi Murthy, co-editor of the Free Speech Collective, an organisation that advocates freedom of expression, concurred with Choudhary, terming content removal as the “government’s need to control the narrative”.
“All platforms are bowing to this trend because they are at the mercy of government permissions to function in the country. Platforms are hardly for free speech,” she said.
As India prepares for the general election of 2024, Murthy said, there is more scope for the government to control the narrative.
“Content removal needs to be read along with internet shutdowns, attacks on journalists, defamation and counter-terror cases. This is all part of eliminating inconvenient voices,” she asserted.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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