Google is the largest search engine of the world. Even if it’s not that old, it is really hard to imagine a world without Google. But along with its usefulness, sometimes it gets infected by harmful content for which the company provides us the feature of reporting. The Tech giant received 29,842 complaints of harmful content from individuals in India and removed 76,967 pieces of content from Google as stated in its monthly ‘Transparency Report’. Along with this, Google also removed 4,50,246 pieces of content because of automated detection in September.
With respect to the Indian IT rules which came into force in May 2021, Google disclosed this information. It has received 35,191 complaints from users in August and the removal action stood at 93,550 pieces of content. In addition, 6,51,933 pieces of content were removed as a result of automated detection. The reports are because of third-party content that violated local laws or personal rights on Google’s Significant Social Media Intermediaries (SSMI) platforms. In addition to that, it stated, “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.”
The removing content action was done under several categories, including copyright (76,444), trademark (493), graphic sexual content (11), court order (10), counterfeit (5), and impersonation and defamation (2 each).
Google stated that in addition to take action for reports from users, the company always invests in fighting harmful content online and use its technology to detect and remove it from its platforms. Google stated that the automated detection helps it to detect content which is against its guidelines and delete it.
Along with Google, Facebook and Whatsapp have also released their compliance report of September. Facebook has “actioned” against more than 26.9 million content pieces while Instagram took action against more than 3.2 million pieces. Moreover, WhatsApp stated that it had banned over 2.2 million accounts in India. The social media are search engine websites have no space for harmful content and always take action against such kind of content.
