Facebook publishes first report under new India IT rules

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As India toughens its stand against the Big Tech over its new IT rules, Facebook on Friday published its first edition of the monthly report under the new IT (Intermediary Guidelines) rules, saying that it removed 311,000 pieces of hate speech content and 1.8 million adult nudity and sexual activity content between May 15 and June 15.

The social network also removed 75,000 pieces of content under the 'Dangerous Organizations and Individuals: Organized Hate' policy, 106,000 pieces of content under the 'Dangerous Organizations and Individuals: Terrorist Propaganda' policy and 118,000 pieces of content related to bullying and harassment in India from its platform and Instagram in the same period.

"Over the years, we have consistently invested in technology, people and processes to further our agenda of keeping our users safe and secure online and enable them to express themselves freely on our platform," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.

"We use a combination of Artificial Intelligence, reports from our community and review by our teams to identify and review content against our policies. We'll continue to add more information and build on these efforts towards transparency as we evolve this report," the spokesperson added.

Google had on June 30 released its transparency report in compliance with the IT rules, saying that it received a total of 27,762 complaints in April, while the number of removals stood at 59,350.

Google was one of the first global tech companies to have published its transparency report in compliance with the new Information Technology (IT) Rules, 2021 (Guidelines for Intermediaries and Digital Media Ethics Code).

Under the new IT rules, significant digital platforms (with over 5 million users) need to publish periodic compliance reports every month.

Homegrown microblogging platform Koo on Thursday became the first Indian social media platform to publish its compliance report following the IT guidelines.

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