Google publishes transparency report under new IT rules; 59K pieces of content removed

Social media giant Google published its monthly transparent report on Thursday where it noted that it had received 27,700 complaints in April 2021, and had taken down 59,350 pieces of content that violated its community guidelines, product policies, or local legal requirement. Under the Centre's new IT Rules, large digital platforms have been directed by the government to publish periodic compliance reports every month to highlight the complaints received and the action that they had taken thereof. While Google has been publishing its transparency report since 2010, this is the first monthly report that the search engine giant has released under the guidelines of India's new IT rules. 

“All of these requests are tracked and included in our existing Transparency Report since 2010. This is the first time we will publish a monthly transparency report in accordance with (India"s) new IT Rules, and will continue to publish more details as we refine our reporting processes for India,” a Google spokesperson told PTI. 

Google monthly compliance report

In the monthly report, Google states that it is 'committed to making improvements in the upcoming iterations of the report' and the next report would feature data and complaints post-May 25, 2021. According to the report, nearly 96 per cent of complaints deal with copyright issues (26,707), 1.3 per cent deal with trademark (357), 1 per cent dealt with defamation (275) another 1 percent deal with legal requests (272), counterfeit deal with 0.4 per cent (114 ) and circumvention with 0.1 per cent (37).  

“These complaints relate to third-party content that is believed to violate local laws or personal rights on Google"s SSMI platforms. This data also includes individual user complaints accompanied by a court order," the report said.

“In future reports, data on removals as a result of automated detection, as well as data relating to impersonation and graphic sexual content complaints received post May 25, 2021, will be included. We are committed to making improvements in the upcoming iterations of the report based on feedback from all stakeholders, including providing more granular data," the report noted.

Google stated that during the period of the report, 59,350 actions were taken with each unique URL in a specific complaint taken as an individual “item". It added that a single complaint may specify multiple items that potentially relate to the same or different pieces of content. The “removal actions” number represents the number of items where a piece of content was removed or restricted during the one-month reporting period. 

(With Agency Inputs)