Half of Netflix govt takedown demands came from Singapore

San Francisco, Feb 9 (IANS) Netflix has removed movies and TV shows from its global platform at the demand of foreign governments and the majority — five of such requests — came from the Singapore government.

The media streaming behemoth revealed the details in its first report, named “Environmental Social Governance”, which it said would provide more transparency on the impact of its platform on society and its governance structures, ZDNet reported on Sunday.

The takedowns all occurred between 2015 and 2020.

The streaming giant said in its report: “We offer creators the ability to reach audiences all around the world. However, our catalog varies from country to country, including for [broadcasting] rights reasons [and] in some cases, we’ve been forced to remove specific titles or episodes of titles in specific countries due to government takedown demands.”

It is pertinent to note that government takedowns aren’t a new phenomena for online media platforms.

Facebook, Apple, Twitter, YouTube, and even Wikipedia often receive and comply with requests from government bodies to remove content from its platforms in those countries.

The reasons for such requests often range from local laws banning certain kinds of content to the publishing of unauthorised material to straight up attempts of censorship, according to Mashable.