52% of Bangladesh's removal requests linked to govt criticism in July-Dec 2023: Google report
Around 52% of the requests made by Bangladesh to the world's top search engine Google in the last six months of 2023 were related to government criticism, as per the Google Transparency Report.
According to the report, published recently, YouTube video removal requests were the most common.
Google, however, took no action on 58% of the government's requests over this period.
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Courts and government agencies around the world regularly request Google to remove contents.
Google reviews these requests closely to determine if any content should be removed because it violates a law or its product policies. In this report, Google discloses the number of requests it receives in six-month periods.
According to the report, Bangladesh made 591 requests in the last six months of 2023. This resulted in 2,943 removal requests, of which 52% were critical of the government.
Of the 591 requests, 580 were to remove content from YouTube. Of the total requests, 310 were critical of the government, while 175 were related to defamation.
As per the report, Google did not take any action in 58.6% of the government's requests.
In 18.6% of the cases, there was insufficient information. In about 11% of the cases, half was removed earlier. About 8% of the cases were removed as per policy.
As per the report, 638,440 videos uploaded from Bangladesh were removed from YouTube in 2023.
In the last three months of 2022, the platform removed 1,15,907 videos from Bangladesh.
The video removal rate increased by 31.19% in the last three months of 2023 compared to 2022.
