According to Facebook’s latest transparency report, India and Turkey are the most frequent censors of the social network, blocking thousands of users’ content, while the US is the country that has requested most information about user accounts.
Between July and December 2013, Indian authorities censored 4,765
Facebook posts which allegedly violated Indian laws that forbid
criticizing religions 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," Facebook
said.
In India, a nation of 1.2 billion people, Facebook has over 100
million registered users. Only the US boasts a higher number of
FB users.
“Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share, and
to make the world more open and connected,” Colin Stretch,
Facebook’s counsel, said in the report, released Friday.
“Sometimes, the laws of a country interfere with that
mission, by limiting what can be shared there.”
Perhaps in an effort to throw some light on its internal
activities in the wake of the NSA scandal, which saw former CIA
analyst Edward Snowden last summer divulge thousands of
classified records, some of which strongly suggested that the NSA
was privy to the social media’s private data, Facebook for the
first time is opening up its records to state-sponsored
censorship.
While India leads the world in total content blocked from users,
Turkey came in a close second with 2,014 pieces of restricted
material, most of which level criticism against the Turkish
government, a practice which is against the law. Germany censored
84 pieces of user content that ran afoul of laws on promoting
Neo-Nazi ideology, as did the authorities in France (80
restrictions) and Austria (78 restrictions).
Facebook, however, is not the only social media service to
experience government interference. Access to Twitter in Turkey
was restricted in the run-up to local elections on March 21. The
ban was eventually lifted on April 3 after the Turkish
Constitutional Court ruled on behalf of freedom of expression and
individual rights.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan commented this week that the ruling lifting the ban
was wrong and should be overturned.
“The constitutional court’s ruling on Twitter did not serve
justice. This ruling should be corrected,” he told a
parliamentary meeting of his AK Party.
In the second category of the transparency report, which
considered government requests for user data, the United States
led the pack with 12,598 government requests on 18,715 Facebook
accounts. This number reflects America’s newfound predilection
for tracking people’s communications around the world: The United
States has requested user data on more than the next seven
countries that made such requests (Australia, Brazil, Germany,
France, India, Italy and the UK) combined.
Facebook said it complied with 81 percent of the data requests.