Facebook: 59,229 Government Requests for Account Data in First Half of 2016

Government requests for Facebook account data were up 27 percent in the first half of 2016 compared with the second half of 2015, according to the social network’s latest Global Government Requests Report.

Government requests for Facebook account data were up 27 percent in the first half of 2016 compared with the second half of 2015, according to the social network’s latest Global Government Requests Report.

Deputy general counsel Chris Sonderby said in a Newsroom post that Facebook received 59,229 requests in the first six months of the year, up from 46,710 in the last six months of 2015.

Content-restriction requests plunged 83 percent, from 55,827 in the second half of 2015 to 9,663 in the first half of 2016, but Sonderby attributed the large discrepancy to requests from France regarding a single image from the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.

The top 10 countries in terms of content-restriction requests in the first six months of 2016 were:

  1. France, 2,213
  2. India, 2,034
  3. Germany, 1,093
  4. Brazil, 1,019
  5. Israel, 962
  6. Austria, 940
  7. Turkey, 861
  8. U.K.,
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