Summary

  • Governments and other agencies worldwide request deletion of online content, with 54% targeting YouTube and 31% aiming at Search, among Google’s businesses.
  • Countries like Russia, India, and Turkey lead in submitting takedown requests between 2020 and 2024.
  • Privacy, defamation, and national security are common reasons for content removal, showcasing a global trend in online censorship.



The internet has become a vehicle for free speech at an unprecedented scale. However, not everyone is equally pleased with opinions online, leading to debates and even heated disputes. Sometimes, governments need to intervene, and request the deletion or removal of content from their locale for an assortment of reasons. With a five-year perspective of such deletions, it appears governments are more eager to shut down rogue YouTube videos than Google Search results.

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Internet shutdowns and content removal have become commonplace, and Surfshark, the popular VPN service provider, recently published a study analyzing the content removal requests Google received in a five-year period, starting 2020. An analysis of over 300,000 takedown requests from courts, governments, and their agencies worldwide revealed that a whopping 54% of all requests were for YouTube content, 31% were for Search, and together, while the remaining 15% collectively accounts for all other Google services worldwide.


The study further highlights that Russia led with the most takedown submissions for YouTube and Google Search as well, while India came in second with 8,000 requests for the video sharing platform, and Turkey came in third with 6,000 requests in the five years. South Korea went after Search results in a big way, ranking second after Russia with close to 16,000 requests to pull content offline. Even if Russia’s massive influence on the data is ignored, YouTube and Search requests collectively account for 70% of all the submissions Google received.


Other interesting findings

How will the decade turn out?



While the reasons for removal of content can vary on a case-by-case basis, Surfshark’s study broadly categorized them into a handful. Privacy and security stood out as a prominent reason in four of the five years data was gathered, and defamation was the leading reason in 2020, while fraud was one of the big ones in 2023. National security topped the list for countries’ reasons to request deletion, with 96,000 submissions

While content removal requests are often legitimate, it is worth noting that Surfshark’s study does not necessarily paint a complete picture. For instance, data from only 150 countries was considered, and 2024’s submissions were only tracked until June. Moreover, the study focuses on the volume of requests, and not the number of items in each request. So, it is possible the countries with fewer submissions actually requested more deletions than Russia, which might have submitted a single request for every piece of content.

In any case, the UnitedStates doesn’t feature high on the list of countries censoring content on YouTube and Search. You can read the complete summary of the study on Surfshark’s website.