Governments around the world are stepping up efforts to censor content on Google sites, regular figures from the search giant show.
The firm received 2,285 requests from governments to remove content in the back half of 2012, up from 1,811 in the first six months of the year, a blog post by legal director Susan Infantino shows. The amount of content covered by those requests also grew, up from 18,070 in 1H12 to 24,179 in the second half of the year.
A new law in Russia saw the number of removal requests there increase from six in 1H12 to 114 in 2H, while elections in Brazil fuelled a rise from 191 requests in 1H12 to 697 in the latter six months of the year.
Infantino states that it is becoming “increasingly clear that the scope of government attempts to censor content on Google services has grown,” since the firm started gathering data on the requests in 2010.