This Is A List Of Countries That Ask Google The Most To Remove Content On The Internet

Many countries ask Google to remove content. (photo: doc. unsplash)

JAKARTA - Google has become the world's number one search engine, with a market share of 92.4 percent. So it is not surprising that this company has attracted the attention of countries around the world, including being asked to remove content.

According to Google's annual Transparency Report, since 2009 companies have been asked to remove content. He received requests from governments around the world.

To find out more, the Netherlands-based VPN company Surfshark has analyzed these files to see which countries ask Google to remove the most content and the most common reasons for the requests.

In this case, Surfshark only filters data from the Transparency Report based on location, the volume of requests between 2011 and 2020, the volume of requests in 2020 only, and the main reason for the request in each country and globally.

Google is not only a search engine, they have services such as Google Docs, Google Play, Gmail, Maps, Photos, Ads, and YouTube. But one of its products, YouTube, dominated takedown requests.

Launching ZDNet, Tuesday, February 1st, YouTube received more removal requests than Google Search. It topped the list of takedown requests in 2020 with 19,775 requests, with web search results not far behind 19,198.

There were even 37 content removal requests on Google Maps. From 2011 to 2020, there were 101,015 takedown requests for YouTube, so requests in 2020 saw a significant jump in numbers.

Surfshark's findings show that Russia has sent more takedown requests to Google over the past decade than all other countries combined, for a total of 123,606 requests over the past ten years. Russia reasoned because of national security to ask for the removal.

Then the United States (US), has made a total of 9,627 requests for removal of content since 2011, on the grounds of defamation, the act of damaging someone's reputation due to oral or written communication.

Although China has only issued 1,252 takedown requests over the past ten years, more than three in four requests (76.04 percent) cited violence as the main reason for content removal requests.

Defamation was the most common cause for requests made, with 10 out of 25 countries citing the most. However, the more uncommon reasons for abolition requests include the Office of Religion requested by Pakistan, Violence from China, Fraud from Canada, and Government Criticism of Thailand and Vietnam's requests.

U.S. removal requests surged in the first year of former U.S. President Donald Trump's administration due to a 285.47 percent rise in fraud-related complaints.

Nearly one in ten of the 3,039,200 US fraud victims in 2017 was conned via the Internet or telephone service. Now the US Government's takedown requests have fallen by 67.23 percent since 2011.

However, Google is not the only company that has received takedown requests. Other companies such as Twitter also produce similar transparency reports. And while Google dominates most video searches and views, the company doesn't control all of them according to the Transparency Report.

The report explains that one of the reasons for not removing content is that the content itself has been removed by the content owner. Sometimes, Google even receives requests to remove content from the Internet.