Mumbai: Social networking giant Facebook has made it mandatory to furnish a legal notice along with any post removal request, making it even more difficult to get rid of objectionable posts.
In a new statement issued to the paper, Global Policy head of Facebook Monica Bickert pointed out that the company have changed its service.
She also highlighted the fact that a post will be taken down on counts of illegality when a government or legal document is presented along with the appeal. And that’s not all – after the submission process is complete, the company will scrutinise it under its legal guidelines.
She then said that no content will be restricted if someone outside the government flags it offensive.
As per another Facebook report, there are around exactly 14,971 pieces of blocked content during the July-December period, second only to France who have around 37,695 block requests.
The social media giant’s move was a result of a 2015 ruling by the Supreme Court of India under the guidelines of Information Technology Act 2000. After the ruling, Facebook ceased acting upon legal requests to remove access to content without a legal document.
While report will now require agency approved documents, users will still be able to mark or flag content they find offensive. However, the content will only be removed or acted upon if it is found to violate the company’s community standards.
The new move will curb a lot of irrelevant requests and help in better management and content filtering. Surprisingly, India also had the second-highest number of user data requests lagging just behind US with 19,235 requests.
