Facebook releases compliance report under new IT Rules; 30.1 million URLs removed

In line with the government's new social media and intermediary rules, Facebook on Friday released its first compliance report. In the report, the social media giant outlined that it removed nearly 30.1 million URLs, including posts, profiles, and pages, and pegged the removal rate at over 95% for all the categories, which includes adult nudity hate speech, terrorist propaganda, suicide and self-harm, violent and graphic content among others. 

Of the 30.1 million URLs removed, 1.8 million pieces of content are containing adult nudity and sexual activity, 2.5 million pieces are violent and graphic content, and about 25 million content pieces are containing spam. 

Facebook releases first compliance report under new IT rule

“We use a combination of Artificial Intelligence, reports from our community, and review by our teams to identify and review content against our policies. We will continue to add more information and build on these efforts towards transparency as we evolve this report,” a Facebook spokesperson said to a leading publisher. 

Partner company, Instagram on the other hand, removed nearly 2,031,300 URLs. Of the number of URLs removed, Suicide and self-injury was the most actioned category with nearly 699,000 takedowns, followed by violent and graphic content at 668,000 removals and adult nudity and sexual activity at 490,000.

On July 15, the platform will publish another report which will contain details of user complaints received by Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp and the action taken by these three platforms on such complaints

Google releases first compliance report

Earlier in the day, Social media giant Google published its monthly transparent report 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. It is pertinent to note that Google has been publishing its transparency report since 2010, but this is the first monthly report that the search engine giant has released under the guidelines of India's new IT rules. 

Under the Centre's new IT Rules, large digital platforms-those with more than 50 lakh users have been directed by the government to publish periodic compliance reports every month to highlight the details of complaints received, the details of such complaints, and the action taken on them, and the number of specific communication links that the platform removed through proactive monitoring.

Koo was the first social media platform to publish the compliance report under the new IT Rules. 

(Credit-markzuckerberg-facebook/pti/unsplash)