ShareChat provided government info on 33 out of 41 requests

BENGALURU: ShareChat provided user information on 33 out of 41 requests made by various law enforcement agencies across India and took down 31 pieces of content on the Election Commission of India’s (EC) request during a 13-month period ending June this year, the regional language social media platform said.

It also took down 11,90,452 pieces of content and banned 5,696 accounts permanently for violating community and content standards and terms of services, it said. Thousands of other accounts were banned temporarily — from one day to 360 days — based on the severity and number of violations.

The data shared by ShareChat is part of the first transparency report released by the Indian social media company. In the report, the Bengaluru startup shared information around the legal requests it had received, details of legal requests for information, rules enforcement and copyright takedowns. ShareChat said in each of these requests for information by law enforcement agencies, data, chat history or content removal were reviewed for legal merit.

In the event of data being shared, ShareChat said it only provided the mobile numbers used for registration, device type, IP address and, in some cases, chat history. ShareChat said it received the highest number of law enforcement requests from Kerala, followed by Telangana.

“In a number of instances, the requests for data were made with incomplete details and further correspondence was not reciprocated by law enforcement, as a result no data was shared by the platform,” Share-Chat said in the report, which was shared exclusively with ET. “According to Indian case law, law enforcement can only send takedown request alongside a judicial order.”

ShareChat, which recently attracted investment from Twitter, took down 31 pieces on the EC’s direction within 30 minutes of receiving the notice. The startup said that in the past year, it received takedown requests for 36,611pieces of content for copyright violation by users from various entertainment companies and small production houses, including Zee TV, Sony, ETV Network, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and ByteDance. It said it complied with all of them.