Governments are becoming more authoritarian, says Google GOOG +1.3%, requesting the takedown of more political material than ever before.
Google’s latest Transparency Report shows that it received 3,846 government requests to remove content from its services – 68 percent up over the second half of 2012. Of these, three percent were overtly related to government criticism, with Google complying with fewer than a third.
“Over the past four years, one worrying trend has remained consistent: governments continue to ask us to remove political content,” says the company’s legal director, Susan Infantino, in a blog post.
“Judges have asked us to remove information that’s critical of them, police departments want us to take down videos or blogs that shine a light on their conduct, and local institutions like town councils don’t want people to be able to find information about their decision-making processes.”
Turkey has consistently been high on the list, and this year was no exception – indeed, content removal requests rocketed ten-fold, thanks largely to the enforcement of an online censorship law. In Russia, too, the introduction of similar legislation – aimed ostensibly at criminal gangs and pedophiles – led to a doubling of take-down requests to 257.
Mike Harris, head of advocacy at campaign group Index on Censorship, says there’s a worrying rise in political requests across Europe as a whole.
“Insulting a government official is being used as a pretext for takedowns,” he says. “The European Commission on Human Rights has made it very clear that politicians should be subject to wider criticism than ordinary individuals.”
In the US, there were 545 requests – up 70 percent on last year – putting the country in second place on the list. Most appear on the surface to have been related to defamation rather than censorship, with criticism of the government accounting for a tiny number.
However, appearances can be deceptive. Some law enforcement agencies, for example, made take-down requests aimed apparently at whitewashing their own behavior, with one asking for the removal of a YouTube clip that allegedly revealed police brutality.
“These officials often cite defamation, privacy and even copyright laws in attempts to remove political speech from our services,” says Infantino.
The company also received requests from an unnamed federal agency to suspend 89 apps from the Google Play store for trademark infringement; it complied in 76 of the cases.
The data is, though, hard to evaluate. Numbers of takedown requests depend on the number of Google users within a country and their access to the free internet, as well as on government attitudes. “Look at the figures for China or other authoritarian states – takedowns are not the method they use, they just block,” says Harris. “Takedown is actually an issue within more democratic countries.”
Google is, in fact, becoming more trenchant in refusing to take down content. Back in 2009, it complied in full or in part with 80 percent of government requests; that figure’s now down to just over a half. Even this figure, though, isn’t as informative as it seems, as governments may just be becoming more trigger-happy with their requests.
“We’ve got to be very careful. In the US, if we’re talking about the First Amendment, which is the crux of the US constitution, then everyone needs to be concerned about takedowns,” says Harris.
“Increasingly, we live in a censorious climate where people see something they find offensive, and the first thing they do is ask for it to be taken down. Is there a culture of intolerance towards opinions and things we find offensive, that may not be illegal?
Government Takedown Requests Rising, Says Google – But How Much Does This Really Tell Us? – Forbes.