Facebook censorship has increased 19% in the past 6 months

Image: Luke Leonard/Mashable

By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai2014-11-04 22:35:15 UTC

Now more than ever, governments around the world are eager to get their hands on data about Facebook users and now more than ever, they want to remove content disappear from the social network.

Global surveillance requests for Facebook user data in the first half of 2014 increased 24% from the second half of 2013, according to the social network's transparency report revealed on Tuesday. A total of 34,946 requests were made between January and June, including messages, IP addresses and account information. Censorship also increased worldwide; compared to the June through December 2013, the amount of content censored on Facebook increased by 19%, according to the report.

Facebook is not the only service that has seen such a sharp increase in surveillance requests and censorship. In September, Google revealed that requests for user data had increased 15% compared to the previous six months, meaning a 150% increase over five years.

In a blog post accompanying the company's third such report, Facebook said that it doesn't accept every single request for user data or request to restrict content.

"As weve said before, we scrutinize every government request we receive for legal sufficiency under our terms and the strict letter of the law, and push back hard when we find deficiencies or are served with overly broad requests," Chris Sonderby, deputy general counsel at Facebook, wrote.

The company also disclosed the number of requests related to national security received by the U.S. government.

The data closed is only available in broad ranges, thanks to government restrictions on companies' transparency. For example, between Jan. 1 and June 30, Facebook received between 0 and 999 National Security Letters (NSLs); the company is not permitted to disclose the precise number. There is no data in this report about NSA-related requests, technically referred to as Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requests, since Facebook is required to wait six months before releasing such data.

Other companies, including Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn and Microsoft have the same constraints when reporting requests related to national security, thanks to a deal that the companies struck with the U.S. government in January. Twitter, on the other hand, recently sued the U.S. government to push for these restrictions to be lifted.

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Facebook censorship has increased 19% in the past 6 months