Supporters of Difa-e-Pakistan (Defense of Pakistan) Council, attend a rally against “The Innocence of Muslims,” in Peshawar, Pakistan last year. (EPA)
Governments the world over wanted the controversial anti-Muslim film “The Innocence of Muslims,” removed from YouTube according to Google’s annual Transparency Report.
The film sparked protests across the Middle East and was even thought to have caused the attack on the American Consulate in Benghazi, Libya which killed US Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
The film was so despised in certain parts of the world that one Pakistani minister even offered a $100,000 reward for the death of the filmmaker, Mark Basseley Youssef.
Twenty different governments requested that videos containing the film, or parts of the film, be removed from YouTube, according to the report.
“We received inquiries from 20 countries regarding YouTube videos that contain clips of the movie, “Innocence of Muslims”: Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Brunei, Djibouti, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Maldives, Malaysia, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and the United States. Australia, Egypt, and the United States requested that we review the videos to determine if they violated our Community Guidelines,” the report reads.
The video did not violate YouTube’s Community Guidelines, which the site uses to regulate what it can and cannot show.
Despite passing the company’s guidelines, Google did eventually block videos containing the film in Indonesia, India, Jordan, Malaysia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Turkey, Egypt and Libya.
The high number of requests by governments to remove “The Innocence of Muslims” from YouTube contributed to an all-time high number of requests received by Google.
Between July and December of 2012, Google handled 2,285 government removal requests on 24,179 videos, while during the same period in 2011 the tech giant received just 1,054 requests.