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Google received 36,265 complaints from users between June 1, 2021, to June 30, 2021

It removed 526,866 number of content based on its automated detection

Social media intermediaries with 5 Mn users in India have to publish compliance reports every month

Tech giant Google received 36,265 complaints between June 1, 2021 and June 30, 2021. As per the Information Technology (Guidelines for Intermediaries and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 that has been enacted by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, social media intermediaries operating in India with a user base of more than 5 Mn have to publish its compliance report at an interval of 30 days among others. 

In the report, the California-based company which also owns popular streaming platform YouTube said that the 36,265 complaints it received were from individual users located in India through designated mechanisms during the one month reporting period. These complaints relate to third-party content that is believed to violate local laws or personal rights on Google’s SSMI platforms. Between the duration of May 1, 2021 to May 30, 2021, the company received 34,883 complaints. 

Of these reported complaints around 95.6% or 34,685 were complaints were related to copyright issues, 1.7% related to other legal issues, 1.2% for trademark issues. There were six complaints related to court order as well. For the month of May there were around 700 complaints related to defamation. 

The tech mammoth took 83,613 removal actions during the same period, more than 71,132 that it removed last month. Google in its report highlighted that around 526,866 removal actions were taken due to automated detection. Google says that it uses technology to tackle against the harmful content detected and then remove it. “This includes using automated detection processes for some of our products to prevent the dissemination of harmful content such as child sexual abuse material and violent extremist content,” the company said.

Google said that it doesn’t always remove the content on the users’ complaints. It said that after receiving complaints regarding content on its platforms, Google assesses them. Google said that it might not remove content because the reason for the removal of the content is not specific enough for Google to know what the user wanted it to remove (for example, no URL is listed in the request), or the content has already been removed by the user when we process the complaint. 

Google has been posting the number of content it removed at the request of the Indian government since 2009.