Facebook’s parent company Meta has received around 55,497 requests for user data from the Indian government in the first half of 2022, a report revealed.
The company received around 50,382 requests in the July-December 2021 period.
According to Meta, requests from governments across the globe for user data rose to 10.5 per cent in the first half of 2022. The US tops the list, followed by India, Germany, Brazil, France, and the UK.
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“We also restricted access to 597 items in response to directions from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) for violations under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, including content against security of the state and public order,” the company said in its Integrity and Transparency Report, Q3 2022.
The company further said it restricted six items in response to directions from the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting for violating Rule 16 of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines & Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.
As part of the compliance under the new IT Rules, 2021, for September, Meta reportedly received 587 reports on Facebook through the Indian grievance mechanism. In the case of Instagram, Meta received 1,115 reports and responded to all of them.
The company added that its actions against hate speech content dipped from 13.5 million to 10.6 million in Q3 2022 on Facebook due to improvement in the accuracy of its AI technology.
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