Russia required Google to block content more often than all other countries combined

Russia sent 60% of all content takedown requests to Google in ten years, more than all other countries combined. This is evidenced by the Google Transparency Report - the statistics that the corporation discloses, writes the BBC Russian Service.

During the period from 2011 to 2020, Russian government agencies contacted Google 123,606 times (60.6% of all requests). Following it in terms of the number of requests - but by a wide margin - are Turkey and India (14,231 and 9899 requests, respectively).

Until mid-2012, Russia was not among the top 15 countries for queries, but a year later it entered the top seven, and in 2016 it broke into first place. Since then, the gap from other states has only grown.

In the requests, the Russian authorities requested the removal of more than 950,000 pieces of content. The overwhelming majority of the requirements of the Russian authorities to Google relate to content on YouTube and the corporation's search engine. Until mid-2018, most queries were about video hosting, and now they are links from search. Google explains this by amendments to the law "On Information" adopted in 2017, which obliged search engines to remove links from the issuance at the request of the ILV.

A third of requests cited a national security threat as the reason for removing content. What specific content the Russian authorities consider such a threat, Google does not disclose, but presumably, according to the BBC, we are talking about extremist materials, terrorism, calls for protests, and so on. Requirements related to the promotion of suicide, incitement to violence, drug use and pornography, the corporation identifies in separate categories.

Recently, according to BBC estimates, Google is increasingly less likely to reject requests from the Russian authorities. In the first half of 2019, almost 50% of requests were rejected, in the second half of the year - 23.2%. In the second half of 2020, there were only 7.7% of such requests.

• During the elections to the State Duma, which took place from September 17 to 19, Google removed the Navalny application from the Google Play app store, and also blocked several YouTube videos and text files in Google Docs. As wrote The New York Times and Bloomberg , this happened after threats to open a criminal case against Google employees. Bloomberg reported on the dissatisfaction of Google employees due to the removal of Navalny's application.
• The corporation was fined 39 million rubles in Russia for not removing prohibited content.