Interim govt made 279 requests to Google in six months

Global tech giant Google (Alphabet) has recently released its transparency report for January to June 2025. According to the report, the interim government made a total of 279 requests in this six-month period to remove content from the platform, most of which sought the removal of content critical of the government.

However, Google appears to have acted on only a limited number of these requests. During this period, the government asked Google to remove 1,023 items of content. By contrast, in the first six months of 2024, when the Awami League government was in power, the number of requests was 337 and the number of items was 4,470.

An analysis of the report shows that the highest number of requests in the first half of this year—181—were made to remove government-critical content. This was followed by 38 requests related to regulated goods and services, and 32 related to defamation.

All 181 government-critical content requests concerned YouTube. The highest number of these requests came from the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC).

Google said that more than 65 per cent of the items requested from Bangladesh lacked sufficient information. Among other actions, 16.1 per cent of requests resulted in no action, 9 per cent of the content had already been removed, 2.5 per cent were removed through legal processes, 3.7 per cent were removed under policy guidelines, and in 3.5 per cent of cases the content could not be found.

YouTube, a Google subsidiary, removes uploaded content that violates its community guidelines, and during this period 621,655 videos were removed from Bangladesh. After coming to power, the interim government repealed the Cyber Security Act and issued the Cyber Security Ordinance, under which, in Section 8, BTRC may request social media platforms to block content.

This provision existed in the previous law as well, but the current government has added a new requirement—if any content is blocked, the government will publicly disclose information on all blocked content in the interest of transparency.

Miraz Ahmed Chowdhury, managing director of Digitally Right, said that since the new ordinance includes a provision requiring disclosure of such information, the public will be able to see what types of criticism the government wants removed once it is published. However, the government has not released any such information so far.