Analysis
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.
Courts, government officials, police, data protection authorities, consumer protection agencies, the military, and others — broken down by requestor at the item level.
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.
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.
Showing reporting periods: —
| Period | Country | Requestor | Product | Reason | Items targeted | Items removed |
|---|
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.