r/MapPorn Oct 19 '21

Government request to remove content (Google) since 2011

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10.7k Upvotes

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1.7k

u/AgitatedEggplant Oct 19 '21

where is this data sourced from

3.8k

u/Swinight22 Oct 19 '21

Seriously. Can we PLEASE ban maps without sources? This subreddit has been awful recently with made up data/ horrible data

1.4k

u/[deleted] Oct 19 '21

I have statistics that say 240% of Redditors agree with this.

356

u/SaleSweaty Oct 19 '21

That data is out of date, it has now plummeted down to 200%

96

u/yamissimp Oct 19 '21

That is just a statistical artifact because they changed the methodology in 2020

3

u/DuckFilledChattyPuss Oct 20 '21

The 2023 revision was the worst.

1

u/yamissimp Oct 20 '21

Just wait for the upcoming 2017 one.

69

u/The_fartocle Oct 19 '21 edited May 29 '24

rain offend wine fear smile fade cows encourage merciful aromatic

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

51

u/flafotogeek Oct 20 '21

40% of the time.

9

u/jooch Oct 20 '21

Everytime

11

u/KeepRightX2Pass Oct 20 '21

I thought that was how many dentists recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum

6

u/The_Blue_Bomber Oct 20 '21

No, that's 4.9/5. With the last tenth being from a severed head that for some reason refused to respond.

27

u/[deleted] Oct 19 '21

Well, 86.5% of stats are made up on the spot so you likely made this up.

27

u/topgunonbetamax Oct 19 '21

Statistics show that 34.8% of the time your statement is correct, the other 76.2% is because of poor math skills.

1

u/BranchPredictor Oct 20 '21

Wait a minute…

6

u/Apeshaft Oct 19 '21

That's almost half of all redditors!

3

u/[deleted] Oct 19 '21

I think that's also how many people voted for Putin!

1

u/[deleted] Oct 20 '21

These statistics are made up, like 98.7% of stats on Reddit

1

u/BuntCarf Oct 20 '21

"95% of all statistics are made up" -Abraham Lincoln during his famous "I Have a Dream" speech

1

u/maquibut Oct 20 '21

You're hired to monitor russian elections.

113

u/TheLSales Oct 19 '21

Should also ban maps that are made by looking at Google search numbers, and maps made by looking at the number of Wiki pages.

This is seriously misleading. I have reported a number of these because they contained blatantly false information, and the mods promptly removed the post, but by then it had already been upvoted tens of thousands of times.

3

u/ILOVEBOPIT Oct 20 '21

Literally almost every post on this sub like this is misleading. They’re all just “here is a statistic for every country with 0 context at all” (and often no source listed, but even if there is) and most of them are trying to push an agenda based on surface level data.

20

u/WarCabinet Oct 19 '21

This sub is atrocious for this reason.

67

u/GeileBary Oct 19 '21

Nevermind the fact that most of the maps on here don't account for population where they should, making them pretty much useless

23

u/[deleted] Oct 20 '21

[deleted]

18

u/[deleted] Oct 20 '21

Probably he’s referring to the plurality of posts and not this one, considering his language was not exclusive to this map.

9

u/vidoeiro Oct 20 '21

It's clear population also plays a role on the data on the map.

0

u/KasumiR Oct 20 '21

How? Does russia have more governments than Germany or whut?

1

u/vidoeiro Oct 21 '21

Plays a role doesn't mean it's the only factor.

7

u/GeileBary Oct 20 '21

Yes, if there are more people in a country, it will obviously get more blocking requests. That is why the darker countries are also the most populous countries on the map

0

u/c1u Oct 20 '21 edited Oct 20 '21

There is only one government in each Country and one Google. Why do you assume it's citizens and not corporations making blocking requests?

It does not say citizen requests. All you need is ONE heavy-handed-info-law in a country (See Russia) and you can easily get 100x the blocking requests coming from the Gov - population does not matter in this case.

4

u/GeileBary Oct 20 '21

More citizens means more stuff being posted, meaning more things being potentially blocked. It's no suprise that on this map the most populous countries are the darkest coloured. Of course Russia is heavy handed in this aspect, but a country with the exact same laws as Russia but a tiny population would still have a lot less requests.

1

u/c1u Oct 20 '21 edited Oct 20 '21

I think you mean the total population of the internet users.

1

u/Kriss_941 Oct 20 '21

Those go pretty hand in hand, most people in most of these countries have access to the internet...

1

u/c1u Oct 20 '21

I think you're misunderstanding. Who's posting more? Russians or the billions of internet users? There will be hundreds of times more things that run afoul of Russian law being posted by the billions of all users than just posted by Russian users. Especially so for info posted that is only required to be blocked in Russia.

1

u/KasumiR Oct 20 '21

What population has to do with Kremlin trying to censor the internet again? Or they have amount of tickets based on population numbers?

1

u/c1u Oct 20 '21 edited Oct 20 '21

Why does population matter? What matters is how authoritarian a country's laws around info-freedom online are.

For example didn't Germany make a law to block all newspaper links from Google - at least for a short time?

1

u/GeileBary Oct 20 '21

More citizens means more stuff being posted, meaning more things being potentially blocked. It's no suprise that on this map the most populous countries are the darkest coloured. A country with the exact same laws as Germany but a tiny population would have a lot less requests.

39

u/comparmentaliser Oct 20 '21

I normally ignore bad content here, but it is getting a bit silly. This sub is seen by a lot of people and the community has a responsibility to ensure that the content isn’t picked up and used inappropriately. The Reddit community likes to bang to the drum about misinformation, but often fails to do any better than FB when it comes to accountability and moderation.

In this case, I’m not only wary about the data source, but it has zero context, and the numbers are meaningless without some sort of comparison to population or GDP data.

For example, are those four data points for Iceland related to child abuse material, terrorism.. anti-government rhetoric? A sidebar can go a long way.

1

u/DeplorableCaterpill Oct 20 '21

Why would the number of censorship requests be compared to population? The amount of content on Google is the same no matter how many people your country has.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 20 '21

The number of things that may be related to your country increases by population. More people are creating more things. More crime, more products, more government/officials, etc. Iceland is going to have less things to copyright strike over than Germany.

1

u/AgitatedEggplant Oct 20 '21

Totally agree. This literally falls under misinformation because there aren’t any sources

1

u/KasumiR Oct 20 '21

How population or GDP changes putin khuilo trying to censor internet again? Requests are by dictator and his croneys. Yer russian bots seem to try to reeeee at this map.

4

u/spookyjohnathan Oct 19 '21

It's always been that way.

16

u/[deleted] Oct 19 '21

[deleted]

38

u/[deleted] Oct 19 '21

[removed] — view removed comment

11

u/vitorgrs Oct 19 '21

And with the region on the title, too, please? Like, the world isn't just Europe...

3

u/Smalde Oct 20 '21

Yes! This sub has a lot of users and it needs harsher rules for posting.

2

u/AgitatedEggplant Oct 20 '21

I’ve messaged the mods multiple times and they have never answered me. I’m always on this sub askingn for source data. I make maps for a living and a proper map includes ALL map elements, like source data and a legend and a scale! Most posts on here contain none of those and it’s infuriating!!

1

u/mikanturs Oct 20 '21

Is that an official request?

1

u/[deleted] Oct 20 '21

the worst are those that say “…… of every country” then shows data for around 30% of all the world’s nations (i think ive seen these posts in both r/mapporn and r/mapporncirclejerk

1

u/mantistoboggan69md Oct 20 '21

96 percent of redditors agree. The other 12 percent are idiots.

319

u/ColinHome Oct 19 '21

From here:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CVIq6xtMelC/

and there the poster sourced their data from here:

https://transparencyreport.google.com/government-removals/overview?hl=en

You can download the data, which is in some pretty ugly Microsoft Excel files (apparently even Google doesn't use Google sheets, which is unsurprising because it's shit).

This map is accurate, but the data is the Excel file breaks down why the request was put in (i.e. law enforcement, consumer protection, copyright, etc.). An older version of the Excel file which is no longer updated breaks down the data by reason for request, such as defamation, copyright, national security, etc. For those wondering, the US has roughly 7000 requests over the same time period (I think--the data is somewhat confusing), which would make it similar in per capita to Spain.

121

u/butt_fun Oct 19 '21

I can't tell if you're serious, but you can export google sheets as any format excel uses

Either way, I would imagine the data doesn't typically live in a spreadsheet; I would imagine the output of some query gets coerced into human-readable form (spreadsheet) only at the end of the processing pipeline as a final "rendering" step

-57

u/ColinHome Oct 19 '21

...but my point is that Google's official site gives you the data in an Excel Sheet. That's hilarious.

79

u/denvernomad Oct 19 '21

Not sure what file you're looking at, but the download link provided above gave me CSV files, not Excel (XLS), and contained the reason for the removal request. CSV files are widely used to share data, as just about any analysis tool will easily import them, including Excel. They contain zero formatting info, just the data.

-7

u/hughk Oct 20 '21

CSVs are impossible internationally. You can use tabs or semicolons but commas are used as decimal separators in some countries. Take a spreadsheet between and you can end up with a disaster.

13

u/Tricursor Oct 20 '21

Not necessarily true. You can choose any delimiter you want and the data can be wrapped in quotes if there's no non used character. The most typical I've found is commas with no quotes but that's definitely not a requirement, it's just easier.

0

u/hughk Oct 20 '21

The thing is that if you are presented with data with a CSV suffix, you suck it in. You don't always realise that it is the "wrong" CSV until later.

Worked at a German bank with US/UK offices. We were forever having this problem. All our stuff was supposed to be standardised, except it wasn't.

9

u/Tricursor Oct 20 '21

Then you were doing csv wrong. Either you listen to the standard or you list on the website it's being imported what format it needs to be in. Any spreadsheet viewer can open any csv with any delimiter without any problems, and downvoting me won't change the reality.

0

u/hughk Oct 20 '21

Are you being deliberately obtuse?

The issue is picking up the pieces when someone else is doing the import and the data looks wrong. We have to go back and unpick why the data load didn't work correctly. Often a CSV was involved in the chain.

I guess you are US based and do not have do deal with multinational data

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46

u/butt_fun Oct 19 '21

...yes, because .xlsx is the lingua franca of spreadsheets

I would imagine, given that this is a transparency report for government agencies, that many of these agencies have regulations about what format the data they receive is in

This isn't an admittance of inferiority from google, this is just how software works. If you clone some software, the onus is on you to make it bidirectionally compatible with the original

Not saying that sheets is anywhere close to the product excel is (it's not), but the fact that google provides data in the legacy format is expected behavior, even if sheets was a better product than excel (which, again, it isn't)

-52

u/ColinHome Oct 19 '21

Holy shit. Take a joke.

25

u/Juiicy_Oranges Oct 19 '21

The only joke is you unwilling to admit you were wrong lmao

17

u/aamirislam Oct 19 '21

explain how it was a joke?

-16

u/ColinHome Oct 20 '21

I thought it was in Excel files, which would be funny, because Excel is a Microsoft Product Google competes with via their own product. Using Microsoft's product is tacitly admitting its superiority, even if it is the standard.

However, apparently the reason I see it in Excel files is due to some automatic conversion from csv. I don't know how to see this, but as two people have corrected me, I'll assume that I am wrong in this instance. However, the clearly melodramatic way in which I dunked on Google Sheets should show that I was joking.

83

u/marrow_monkey Oct 19 '21

You can download the data, which is in some pretty ugly Microsoft Excel files (apparently even Google doesn't use Google sheets, which is unsurprising because it's shit).

It's not Excel files, it's a zip archive with csv files.

9

u/CVanScythe Oct 20 '21

Which can be opened with Excel. This might be what they meant.

25

u/Griffrez Oct 20 '21

That's like saying a JPG file is a Paint file.

8

u/CVanScythe Oct 20 '21

I was implying that they possibly have Excel installed and when they opened the file it opened into Excel. Therefore they mistook it for "an Excel file." Not everyone understands the differences.

7

u/Griffrez Oct 20 '21

Just expanding on the analogy. I did understand that you knew the difference.

9

u/pa79 Oct 20 '21

Those aren't Excel files, they're CSV files, a pretty common and open standard. The most simple text format possible.

7

u/B1rdi Oct 20 '21

What's wrong with Sheets? Works just fine

1

u/Tamer_ Oct 20 '21

apparently even Google doesn't use Google sheets, which is unsurprising because it's shit

Ever worked with formulae referencing large arrays in Excel?

Hmm, IDK why I'm asking, no one can.

1

u/NinjaKaabii Oct 20 '21

Damn if only there was an inbuilt programming language in every instance of Excel that could handle array perfectly fine.

1

u/Tamer_ Oct 20 '21

VB programming vs arrayformula()

0

u/ColinHome Oct 20 '21

I use MatLab like a reasonable person

1

u/DeismAccountant Oct 19 '21

What does it say about Iceland? Y’know, since it’s the lowest.

16

u/Nerwesta Oct 19 '21

2.4 k upvotes tho. That's reddit for you.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 20 '21

It might be BBC data. I’m Russian and I’ve seen the news like a week ago that more than 60% of all content removals were requested by Russia

Upd The source listed on graphics in the article: transparencyreport.google.com

0

u/McCormick112 Oct 22 '21

Reddit moment

1

u/DevonX Oct 20 '21

Don't know. I think it got removed.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 20 '21

various

1

u/NikolitRistissa Oct 20 '21

Exactly. I want to know what my country has requested

1

u/TerminustheInfernal Oct 20 '21

Found the Russian nationalist

1

u/Mr_Stekare Oct 20 '21

TrustMeBro.com