Google removes 93,550 content pieces in August in India: Compliance report

Google received 35,191 complaints from users and removed 93,550 pieces of content based on those complaints in the month of August, the tech giant said in its monthly transparency report.

In addition to reports from users, Google also removed 651,933 pieces of content in August as a result of automated detection.

Google had received 36,934 complaints from users and removed 95,680 pieces of content based on those complaints in July. It had removed 5,76,892 pieces of content in July as a result of automated detection. The US-based company has made these disclosures as part of compliance with India’s IT rules that came into force on May 26.

Google, in its latest report, said it had received 35,191 complaints in August from individual users located in India via designated mechanisms, and the number of removal actions as a result of user complaints stood at 93,550.

These complaints relate to third-party content that is believed to violate local laws or personal rights on Google’s significant social media intermediaries (SSMI) platforms, the report said. The content removal was done under several categories, including copyright (92,750), trademark (721), counterfeit (32), circumvention (19), court order (12), graphic sexual content (12) and other legal requests (4).

Recently, Facebook and WhatsApp have also released their compliance reports for the month of August. Facebook said it had “actioned” about 31.7 million content pieces across 10 violation categories proactively during August in the country, while its photo sharing platform, Instagram took action against about 2.2 million pieces across nine categories during the same period proactively.