Today we invite you to read our bi-annual update to the Automattic transparency report, covering the period from July 1, 2017 to December 31, 2017. Read through to find details on the number of information requests and takedown demands we received from governments, as well as from intellectual property rights holders under the DMCA.
Our commitment to transparency pushes us to find ways to improve what we share, and we’re pleased to announce three major additions for this reporting period. In this update, we include statistics on the number of notices we’ve received from Internet Referral Units (IRUs). We also share details on the country blocks that we’ve been forced to put in place in countries like Turkey and Russia. Finally, we include more insight into the government takedown demands we receive and how we respond. Want to learn more? Read on!
Internet Referral Unit Stats
As we acknowledged in our last blog post, addressing extremist content while simultaneously protecting freedom of speech is a major challenge for online platforms, including WordPress.com. Currently, state authorities report to us material that they believe to be in violation of our Terms of Service, which we then evaluate. In an effort to shed more light on this process, we’ve created a whole new section in our report, where we’ll share updated figures every six months. Click here for more information.
Country Block Transparency
Automattic routinely receives censorship demands from government agencies around the world concerning content published on WordPress.com. We go to great lengths to fight these, but are sometimes left with no choice but to geoblock content in certain regions. We otherwise risk having access to our services completely cut off.
We’ve experimented with different ways of making this data public in the past (including submitting details to the Lumen Database, and creating a “mirrored archive” for Russia), but until now there has been no central place to find details on all currently geoblocked WordPress.com sites. Our new page changes all that, and includes the lists in text format to hopefully make it easier for censorship-monitoring sites like OONI and Blocked to import and track.
More Insight Into Government Takedown Demands
Previously, we didn’t include situations where we removed content because it violated our policies in the “percentage of requests where content was removed.” This is because we would have removed the content regardless of how we came across it. In other words, the fact that the content was brought to our attention via a government demand or court order had no bearing on the action we took. For example, if a government entity reported a site for selling controlled substances, we’d suspend the site, but not count that as a request where content was removed. However, we recognized that we could provide more insight about the actions we take and the types of reports we’re seeing from each country by sharing a new data point: “percentage of requests where content was removed due to a violation of our policies.” To minimize potential confusion, we’ve renamed the original description to “percentage of requests where content was removed solely in response to the demand.”
We hope that you find all of this new information interesting, and we’d encourage other platforms to share their own experiences in these areas.
Transparency Report 