Google named Russia the leader in the number of requests to remove information

At the end of 2016, the number of requests to Google from Russian government agencies, law enforcement agencies and police to remove illegal content increased by 478% and amounted to 13.2 thousand, RBC reports, citing a company report called Transparency Report.

According to the report, requests from Russian authorities accounted for more than half of all requests to remove content received by Google last year: government agencies in other countries sent a total of 9.3 thousand such requests to the company.

As follows from Google materials, 85% of requests from Russia were sent to ensure “national security”, 5% of requests related to “criticism of government officials,” and another 2% related to the promotion of suicide and other violations of laws. As a result, Google satisfied 74% of Russian requests by deleting or blocking the resources mentioned in them. In particular, at the request of the authorities, the company removed information about the terrorist attacks in Grozny in one of the blogs and limited access to some materials of the banned terrorist organization "Islamic State"*.

The company also noted that almost all the activity of the Russian authorities occurred in the second half of last year: from July to December, Google received over 11 thousand requests from Russia. 43.4% of them were related to YouTube videos, and 43.2% were related to web searches. Thus, at the request of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the company blocked for users located in Russia 160 videos on YouTube, which allegedly contained extremist materials.

A rapid increase in requests from Russia was also recorded by Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft

RBC notes that Russia is also among the leaders in the number of requests to remove content from the Twitter microblogging network - in 2016, the authorities sent 2.1 thousand requests to the Twitter administration to remove illegal content. According to this indicator, Russia was second only to Turkey (5.5 thousand requests). In total, Twitter received 11.1 thousand requests to remove content over the course of the year.

According to the report, at the request of Russian authorities, Twitter deleted or restricted domestic access to 65 accounts and hid 271 tweets that contained materials promoting suicide, information that violated personal data laws, and content deemed extremist. At the same time, as an example of a request that was not satisfied, the company cited a request to delete a tweet containing allegations of corruption. The service administration also refused to delete a number of tweets “with links to news materials about territorial conflicts and tweets criticizing the former Soviet regime.”

An increase in requests from Russia in 2016 was also recorded by Facebook and Microsoft. For example, last year the social network satisfied 251 Russian requests to block illegal content, but the company does not disclose the total number of requests from Russia. For comparison, based on requests from Brazil, the social network blocked 2.7 thousand different posts or videos.

As for Microsoft, the company received 211 requests to remove various content, while in 2015 there were only three. A significant portion of the requests were related to the removal of data from the Bing search engine results under the Right to Be Forgotten law. One of the first famous people to take advantage of this right was businessman Sergei Mikhailov, nicknamed Mikhas, who was arrested in Switzerland in the mid-1990s on charges of participation in the Solntsevo organized crime group.