U.S. government issues more takedown requests than China, including one for “government criticism”

By Madison Ruppert

Editor of End the Lie


It is now an indisputable fact that the United States is attempting to control the internet through censorship; in fact the U.S. issued more “content removal requests” to Google than China, which is regularly criticized in America for their draconian internet policies.

While China issued 3 content removal requests from January to June 2011 for a total of 121 items to be removed, the United States issued a whopping 92 requests with a total of 757 items requested to be removed.

The disturbing part is not just the sheer number of requests and the compliance rate of 63%, but also the plethora of reasons given for the takedown requests.

The most popular reason given by what Google classifies as “Executive, Police, etc.” (meaning police and any one of the many agencies that falls under the executive branch) is “Privacy and Security” with 13 requests.

Defamation is the most popular reason given by court orders, with a total of 29 requests made, the vast majority of which were direct at web search results.

The executive and police have made three requests due to so-called “Hate Speech”, two for “Impersonation” and “Violence”, along with one for “Government Criticism” and one for “National Security”.

Both of the requests made for national security and government criticism reasons were made due to videos on YouTube.

This begs the obvious question: in the United States, where we are supposed to have free speech, what on earth is the government doing attempting to get the largest search engine and video hosting site to censor items for government criticism?

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