Govt removed over 8,000 social media links in 2022: Report

In a seminar held by Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) on Thursday morning, it was reported that over 8,000 Bangladeshi social media links were removed by the government in 2022.

With the aim of creating awareness about cyber security, the day-long meeting was held under the initiative of BTRC in collaboration with Cyber Crime Awareness Foundation.

Mustafa Jabbar, Minister of Posts and Telecommunications of the Government of Bangladesh, was present as the chief guest. The meeting was organised under Shyam Sunder Sikder, Chairman and Senior Secretary at BTRC, in the main conference room of the commission.

In the welcome speech, Subrata Roy Maitra, Commissioner at BTRC, said that the issue of cyber security is widely discussed and every country in the world is facing various problems related to cybercrime. He emphasised organising more awareness campaigns and workshops to make the younger citizens aware of cyber security.

Noting that some of the most sensational cyber attacks in the world have caused financial losses of billions of dollars, Md Nasim Parvez, Director General of System & Services at BTRC, said that in 2021, the rate of sexual harassment through social media was 7.69%, sharing of offensive images was 5.85% and cyberbullying was 50.16%. 

In 2022, the rate of online sexual harassment increased to 9.34%. The use of offensive messages reached 6.93% and the rate of cyberbullying rose to 50.27%. 

Additionally, the seminar shed light on how many links were requested to be removed from popular websites and domains. In 2021, 1,235 requests were made to remove links from websites/domains. In 2022, the number was 645. In both years, the removal rate for links from websites and domains was 100%, meaning all the removal requests were successful.

The presentation also highlighted the details of links removed from social media in 2021 and 2022: 8,916 links were removed from Facebook in 2021, while 8,228 links were removed in 2022. 

1,013 links were removed from YouTube in 2021 and 222 in 2022. In 2022, 1,159 links were removed from TikTok, 67 were removed from Bigo, Likee and Imo, and 29 from Twitter.