The two nations want content blocked because it criticizes the government or religion

Apr 12, 2014 22:05 GMT  ·  By

Facebook’s latest Transparency Report is out and it indicates that the United States is the most active country when it comes to requests made for user data, something that can be noticed in all such reports from major tech companies.

At the same time, India and Turkey are the two countries that censor the social network most often. Between July and December 2013, Indian authorities were involved in the censorship of over 4,700 Facebook posts which may have violated Indian laws regarding criticizing religion or the government.

“We restricted access in India to a number of pieces of content reported primarily by law enforcement officials and the India Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) under local laws prohibiting criticism of a religion or the state,” reads Facebook’s report.

The company has recently announced that there are 100 million registered users coming from India. This is a pretty high number considering there are about 200 million Internet users in the nation with 1.2 billion people.

While Facebook admits that the company’s mission is to give people the power to share their personal beliefs and to ultimately make the world more open and connected, sometimes the laws of a country interfere with this mission and there’s little the social network can do about it.

Turkey, the country that recently waged war against Twitter and YouTube because of some videos that portray government officials discussing bogus incidents that would justify a military intervention in Syria, comes second when it comes to the number of censored Facebook posts.

The turkey is responsible for shutting down over 2,000 materials posted on the social network. Here too, the posts criticized the Turkish government, which isn’t allowed. Other nations called for the censorship of various posts too. For instance, Germany targeted content promoting Neo-Nazi ideology.

Overall, in the second half of 2013, Facebook received over 28,000 data requests from various law enforcement agencies from all over the world. These impacted over 38,000 accounts.

Facebook started releasing Transparency Reports last August, which means we can’t compare the data with previous years. However, it’s possible to draw a comparison between the second and first halves of 2013.

During the first six months of last year, the social network received over 25,600 data requests affecting nearly 38,000 accounts. The company has received a similar number of data requests as other tech giants like Google and Yahoo.