Facebook content restrictions soar after crackdown on school shooting video

Facebook says that the number of times it removed content from its platform at the request of local law enforcement skyrocketed in the first half of the year after it cracked down on a viral video of a Mexican school shooting.

According to Facebook’s midyear transparency report, the company restricted content that violated local law 28,036 times in the first half of 2017 — a 304 percent increase from the second half of 2016.

More than 20,000 of those restrictions were of a gruesome video showing a January school shooting in Monterrey, Mexico, in which a 15-year-old student wounded three students and a teacher before killing himself.

{mosads}The transparency report, released Monday, also shows that Facebook saw an uptick in government requests for user data during the same period. The company received 78,890 such requests from authorities around the world — a 21 percent increase from the latter half of 2016.

Authorities in the U.S. submitted 32,716 requests covering 52,280 users. Facebook handed over information in response to 85 percent of those requests.

Monday’s report also included a new section on intellectual property that showed that Facebook received about 266,000 reports of copyright and trademark infringement.