Facebook has released its second official government transparency report as part of it efforts to implement censorship within the social networking site.
The said report was released after Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan blocked Twitter for ignoring court orders to remove illegal links.
According to PCMag, Facebook has already removed 4,765 pieces of content in India, and 2,014 pieces of restricted content from Turkey. Said contents were removed after violating local laws forbidding criticism or defamation of Ataturk or the Turkish state.
"We have expanded on our first report to include information not only about government requests for account information, but also about government requests to restrict or remove content from our service on the grounds that it violates local law," Facebook said in a blog post.
Furthermore, the world's biggest social network clarified that it does not remove content from their service entirely unless violation of their community standards has been proven.
"We take a similar approach to government requests for account information. When we receive a request for information, we carefully assess whether we are legally required to comply."
Facebook provided information on 81 percent of the 12,598 user data requests, or less than 20,000 accounts, from the United States government. The United Kingdom came in second with 1,906 requests and 71 percent of it was granted. Access to content is limited to the requesting country only so requests to access data of other nations are automatically rejected.
Additionally, Facebook rejects requests that are "overly broad, vague or do not comply with legal standards", and shares only the most basic information in most cases such as a user's name and IP address.
The decision to release a transparency report was made to make the users understand that the social networking site does not surrender all data to the government despite allegations that the government is using Facebook as a surveillance tool.
