| Country | Court Orders | Requests from government agencies or law enforcement | Number of sites specified | Percentage of requests where content was removed due to a violation of our policies | Percentage of requests where content was removed solely in response to the demand |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brazil | 1 | 13 | 11 | 7% | 0% |
| Dominican Republic | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0% | 0% |
| France | 0 | 3 | 3 | 67% | 0% |
| Germany | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0% | 0% |
| India | 0 | 2 | 2 | 50% | 0% |
| Italy | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0% | 0% |
| Malaysia | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0% | 0% |
| Netherlands | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0% | 0% |
| Norway | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0% | 0% |
| Pakistan | 0 | 5 | 5 | 0% | 40% |
| Qatar | 0 | 1 | 1 | 100% | 0% |
| Republic of Korea | 0 | 2 | 1 | 0% | 0% |
| Russia | 0 | 85 | 65 | 19% | 56% |
| Turkey | 16 | 0 | 18 | 13% | 81% |
| United Kingdom | 0 | 4 | 4 | 25% | 0% |
| United States | 0 | 2 | 2 | 100% | 0% |
| TOTAL | 17 | 123 | 118 | 19% | 45% |
For demands that come from Pakistan, Russia, and Turkey, we will generally geoblock the specific content or site(s) at issue, so that WordPress.com remains otherwise accessible in the country. However, in cases of particularly egregious censorship, we have pushed back and do push back where possible. You can read a bit more about our approach to those kinds of takedown demands here.
Recent Examples
Here are a few recent examples of takedown demands that we received:
- Malaysia – The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (“MCMC”) demanded the removal of a post from a site that contains a possibly fictitious and purposefully defamatory article about a senior officer in the Malaysian Civil Service.
- Pakistan – The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority demanded the removal of posts from a site that contains possibly blasphemous religious content.
- Russia – We received multiple takedown demands from the Russian Government relating to the war in Ukraine, including blogs covering people’s experience in Ukraine and people reposting information posted by the Ukrainian government outside of other social media platforms.
Transparency Report 