Google India in its monthly compliance report has revealed that it removed over one lakh pieces of bad content from the internet in India. The company today revealed that it removed 104,285 pieces of content from the internet as a result of user complaints. This is a significant increase from the 94,173 pieces of bad content it removed in December 2021 in compliance with the new India IT Rules 2021.
The tech giant revealed that it received a total of 33,995 complaints for content removal in India between a span of January 1, 2022 to January 31, 2022. Google said that these complaints were received from individual users and that they were related to third-party content that violates local laws or personal rights on the company’s 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,” Google wrote in its report.
Of these 33,995 complaints 32,878 complaints pertained to copyright infringement, 462 pertained to legal issues, 296 complaints were related to trademark issues, 230 complaints were related to defamation, 72 complaints were related to counterfeit information, 23 were associated with graphic sexual content, 19 content removal requests were made by courts, 12 were related to circumvention, while 13 were related to impersonation.
In total the company removed 401,374 pieces of bad content from the internet in India as a result of automated detection. “…we invest heavily in fighting harmful content online and use technology to detect and remove it from our 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 added.
Overall, Google removed 103,802 pieces of content owing to copyright issues, 445 owing to trademark issues, 31 owing to court order, four pieces of graphic sexual content: 4 and one piece of bad content each owing to circumvention, impersonation and legalities.