Meta restricts record 2,270 contents in Bangladesh in Jan-Jun
On government requests, Meta restricted 2,270 social media contents in Bangladesh in the first half of the year, highest ever for the country in a six-month period.
The contents were not restricted to people outside Bangladesh as Meta found those did not violate laws of other countries, according to the US tech company's latest half-yearly transparency disclosure.
The previous record for Meta content restrictions in Bangladesh was 309 in the last six-months of 2022.
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This year saw a surge in restrictions not only in terms of access to the social media contents, but also in terms of the number of government requests for content information, user data and account details.
Also, Meta's response to the government requests was on the rise this year.
The government made 988 content restriction requests in the January-June period this year, up from 836 in the previous six months.
Of these requests, 956 were under the category of legal process request that refers to Meta's cooperation with the legal process of a country.
However, emergency disclosure requests to Meta halved to 32, compared with the previous six months.
Besides, the government asked for user information of 1,454 Meta accounts, up from 1,278 in the previous six months, and Meta responded in 67.21% of the cases.
The response rate surged above 60% in the mid-2021, in line with the surge in the number of requests for information from Meta.
Meta's response to emergency disclosure pleas has been in decline since 2017 when around 60% of the emergency requests were responded to.
Meta received more than 2.71 lakh content restriction requests from the world's governments in the first half of 2023, while the number of requests for user or account information was nearly 4.7 lakh. The global average response rate where Meta produced some data against the requests was 76.9%.
Both the numbers of requests and Meta's response rate increased globally, compared to the previous six months.
The USA, India, Brazil, Germany, France and the UK were among the top countries in making requests to Meta to disclose their citizen's social media data.
