Transparency Data

Interactive dashboards built from platform transparency reports — combining data that companies publish separately across services or periods into a single comparative view. All processing happens in your browser; no data is sent to a backend.

Google — Government Removal Requests

10 years of government requests to remove content from Google products. 160 countries, 42 products, 22 reasons, 13 reporting periods — built into a multi-year trend explorer.

Google Government requests 2019–2025

Three things worth noticing in the data

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VLOP Platforms — DSA Transparency Reports

H2 2025 EU Digital Services Act reports across Google (6 services), X, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and AliExpress — combined into a single cross-platform view covering notices, own-initiative actions, government orders, and appeals.

Google X TikTok Meta Pinterest AliExpress EU DSA H2 2025

What the data doesn't tell you

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Government Requests to Remove Content from Google

From 2014 to 2024 I was a primary author of the Greater China portion of the Google Transparency Report. This dashboard explores Google's government removal requests dataset (the detailed reporting format Google adopted in 2019) across 13 reporting periods, 160 countries, 42 Google products, and 22 stated reasons for removal. Unlike Google's own report — which is organized one period at a time — this view is built around trends across reporting periods: every filter combination becomes a multi-year time series, and you can break the time series down by country, requestor, product, or reason.

Source: Google Transparency Report — Government requests to remove content. Data is loaded directly in your browser; no requests are sent to a backend.

What this dataset captures

Who's asking

Courts, government officials, police, data protection authorities, consumer protection agencies, the military, and others — broken down by requestor at the item level.

What's targeted

Specific Google products — Web Search, YouTube, Maps, Blogger, Play, and 37 others — along with the stated reason: defamation, privacy, national security, government criticism, copyright, and more.

What Google did

Item-level outcomes: removed on legal grounds, removed on policy grounds, content already gone, content not found, not enough info to act, or no action taken.

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A few things to look for

Important caveats: a "request" is what a government submitted; an "item" is a specific URL, video, account, or piece of content cited in that request. One request can target many items. Google's response categories are removed (legal), removed (policy), content already removed, content not found, not enough information, and no action taken. The "removal rate" metric here counts the first three.


Data: Google Transparency Report, detailed reporting format (2019–H1 2025). Analysis and visualizations by Kieran Maynard. Charts use Chart.js. No analytics or tracking on this page beyond the site default.

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