Google bans nearly 1 lakh content pieces in India

Google India receives a huge number of complaints on a daily basis and it takes action by slapping a ban on wrongdoers or removing the offending content. The action taken by Google indicates that the crackdown against all those who are using questionable means to post their content online will not slow down. According to the latest revelations, Google said that it has received 35,191 complaints from users alone. It also revealed that as many as 93,550 pieces of content were removed based on those complaints in the month of August. This was revealed by Google 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 has to make these disclosures to comply with India's new IT rules that came into force on May 26, 2021.

Google said that 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. "Some requests may allege infringement of intellectual property rights, while others claim violation of local laws prohibiting types of content on grounds such as defamation. When we receive complaints regarding content on our platforms, we assess them carefully," it added.

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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).

Google said in addition to reports from users, the company invests heavily in fighting harmful content online and use technology to detect and remove it from its platforms. "This includes using automated detection processes for some of our products to prevent the dissemination of harmful content such as child sexual abuse material and violent extremist content."

Google said automated detection enables it to act more quickly and accurately to enforce its guidelines and policies. These removal actions may result in removing the content or terminating a bad actor's access to the Google service, it added.

"We balance privacy and user protection to: quickly remove content that violates our Community Guidelines and content policies; restrict content (e.g., age-restrict content that may not be appropriate for all audiences); or leave the content live when it doesn't violate our guidelines or policies," it added.

Facebook and WhatsApp too have taken action against wrongdoers in the month of August. While Facebook "actioned" about 31.7 million content pieces, WhatsApp said it had banned over two million accounts in India.