Over the past ten years, around 150 countries have sent Google requests to remove certain pieces of content. This comes up to 355,000 requests in total, and it turns out that 61% of these requests came from Russia alone with all things having been considered and taken into account. That means that Russia sent 215,000 content removal requests to Google, which averages out to 59 requests made each and every day for a decade.
This data comes from a recent report released by Surfshark, with one of the researchers involved commenting that solely servicing Russian content removal requests could be a full time position at Google given the enormous volume. With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that 85% of these requests came from 6 countries, all of whom made over 10,000 requests each.
In spite of the fact that this is the case, no country comes close to Russia in this regard. South Korea comes in at a distant second with 27,000 requests, or 7 on a daily basis. The East Asian nation is followed by India, where 20,000 requests originated from. Turkey and Brazil were responsible for 19,000 and 12,000 requests respectively, with the US coming in sixth thanks to its 11,000 requests.
One thing that bears mentioning is that countries like China and Iran have a surprisingly low volume of requests. China has only made 1,261 in the previous decade, with Iran making just 2 in the same time frame. Furthermore, the notorious dictatorship of North Korea made absolutely no content removal requests whatsoever.
However, this is largely due to Google being blocked in those countries because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up restricting access to begin with. That makes content removal less necessary for these nations than might have been the case otherwise.
Many of these requests had to do with YouTube, which received 175,000 content removal requests, or just under half of the total. YouTube was followed by Google Search with 104,000 requests, and Blogger with 17,000 requests.
27% of these requests had something or the other to do with national security, and there has been a 300% uptick in these requests since 2022. A clear correlation can be seen between the increase and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Read next: What Ecommerce Apps Collect the Most User Data?
This data comes from a recent report released by Surfshark, with one of the researchers involved commenting that solely servicing Russian content removal requests could be a full time position at Google given the enormous volume. With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that 85% of these requests came from 6 countries, all of whom made over 10,000 requests each.
In spite of the fact that this is the case, no country comes close to Russia in this regard. South Korea comes in at a distant second with 27,000 requests, or 7 on a daily basis. The East Asian nation is followed by India, where 20,000 requests originated from. Turkey and Brazil were responsible for 19,000 and 12,000 requests respectively, with the US coming in sixth thanks to its 11,000 requests.
One thing that bears mentioning is that countries like China and Iran have a surprisingly low volume of requests. China has only made 1,261 in the previous decade, with Iran making just 2 in the same time frame. Furthermore, the notorious dictatorship of North Korea made absolutely no content removal requests whatsoever.
However, this is largely due to Google being blocked in those countries because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up restricting access to begin with. That makes content removal less necessary for these nations than might have been the case otherwise.
Many of these requests had to do with YouTube, which received 175,000 content removal requests, or just under half of the total. YouTube was followed by Google Search with 104,000 requests, and Blogger with 17,000 requests.
27% of these requests had something or the other to do with national security, and there has been a 300% uptick in these requests since 2022. A clear correlation can be seen between the increase and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Read next: What Ecommerce Apps Collect the Most User Data?
