Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level : Not Much
Mains level : Combating misinformation spread on social media
- Indian legal demands for online content removal are the fourth highest in the world, according to a report.
India on the top
- For the study, the researchers collated all data to find out which governments censor online content the most and which channels are targeted by each government.
- India is followed by Russia, Turkey, France, Mexico, Brazil, Germany, Pakistan, the US and the UK in the top 10.
- India and Russia are well ahead, accounting for 19.86 and 19.75 percent of the overall number of removal requests (390,764), respectively, Bischoff said.
- While India sent 77,620 content removal requests, Russia sent 77,162 requests during the study period.
- However, these two countries do not always dominate the top spots across all channels.
Why censorship in India?
- The findings come at a time when India is trying to find ways to fight misinformation spread on social media.
- According to Twitter records, many content removal demands from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology simply cited a violation of Section 69(A) of the Information Technology Act, 2000.
On the hit list: Social media contents
- While Facebook received most of the content take down requests from India, Google got it from Russia, Microsoft from China, Twitter from Turkey and Wikimedia from the US.
- In fact, a vast majority – more than 90 per cent – of India’s government content removal requests went to Facebook, the findings showed.