Kenya is among a number of countries that asked Google to remove various content from the internet. According to a report by Surfshark, Kenya asked Google to take down 31 pieces of content in 2021.
Russia was the leading country with 123,606 take-down requests, followed by Turkey with 14, 231 requests. India came in third with 9,899 requests while the United States came in fourth with 9,627 requests. On fifth position was Brazil with 8,148 requests.
“We receive content removal requests through a variety of avenues and from all levels of government — court orders, written requests from national and local government agencies, and requests from law enforcement professionals.
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“Sometimes users will forward us government removal requests, such as when someone attaches a court order showing certain content to be illegal.
“Some requests ask for the removal of multiple pieces of content, and, conversely, there may be multiple requests that ask for the removal of the same piece of content,” read part of a transparency report from Google.
The take-down requests target a variety of content from defamation, violence, gender-based and political.
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Some of the content taken down from Kenya include requests from as far back as a decade ago when the search engine started receiving requests in 2009.
Google says that the take-down requests have an impact on search results and the entire google platform.
Among the platforms with the highest take-down requests include YouTube which had 101,015 requests to remove content, compared to 60,898 pieces of content which were requested to be taken down from the search engine.
Other Google products that received take-down requests include Docs, Gmаil, аnd Google Photos.
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