In its biannual Global Transparency Report, Google reported that in the past six months, the Internet giant has received more than 1,000 requests from governments around the world to take down information, whether YouTube videos or search listings, according to CNET. This "alarming" level of steadily increasing government censorship included 187 requests from the U.S. government to remove 6,192 pieces of content, 42 percent of which Google complied with, Google said. That's a 103 percent increase over the previous six-month period, reported Politico.
The Global Transparency Report, released Sunday, June 17, provides data from July to December 2011. Noting that this was the fifth such transparency report released, the official Google blog said that "just like every other time before, we’ve been asked to take down political speech. It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect—Western democracies not typically associated with censorship."
Most of the removal requests were related to politics, such as YouTube videos criticizing governments, reported GlobalPost.
Besides requests to take down content, the Google report also includes data on governments' requests for user information. For the fourth report in a row, the United States has topped the list of countries requesting user data, reported Mashable. The U.S. filed 6,321 requests for information from 12,243 users; Google complied with 93 percent of the United States' user data requests -- the highest compliance rate of any country on the list. Brazil enjoyed the second-highest compliance rate, at 90 percent of its 1,615 requests for user data granted.
Brazil's government filed 194 requests for 554 content items to be removed, and Google complied with 54 percent of those requests. According to Google, take-down requests in Brazil are high in comparison with other countries because of the popularity of the Google social networking site Orkut.
This was the first time the report included removal requests from the Bolivian government. Less than 10 requests were filed, and 100 percent were complied with.
The Index on Censorship highlighted one content removal request that Google did not approve: The Canadian government unsuccessfully requested that Google take down a YouTube video of a man urinating on his Canadian passport and then flushing it down the toilet.
Ironically, while leading the rest of the world in requests to censor online information, the United States and Brazil also are meanwhile leading an international transparency initiative for open government.
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Note from the editor: This story was originally published by the Knight Center’s blog Journalism in the Americas, the predecessor of LatAm Journalism Review.
