Facebook has published data on the number of piracy takedown notices the company receives. During the first half of 2017, the social media giant removed 1.8 million posts or files, following copyright holder requests. Interestingly, the company rejected nearly a third of all requests in their entirety.

As one of the largest user-generated platforms on the Internet, Facebook has to battle a constant stream of unauthorized copyright material.

To facilitate this process, Facebook has rolled out a few anti-piracy initiatives in recent years.

The company has a “Rights Manager” tool that automatically detects infringing material and allows owners to take down or monetize this content. In addition, Facebook uses the third-party service Audible Magic to spot and remove pirated music tracks.

Thus far, little was known about the number of copyright takedown requests Facebook processes every month, but new details released in its new transparency report a few hours ago provides some context.

During the first six months of 2017, a total of 224,464 requests were received by Facebook. One request can list a single post or file, but they can contain more items. During this period, 1,818,794 items were removed from Facebook, which is roughly 10,000 per day.

“Each report submitted by a rights holder is processed by our IP Operations team, which is a global team of trained professionals who provide around-the-clock coverage in multiple languages,” Facebook writes.

“If the report is complete and valid, the team will promptly remove the reported content, typically within a day or less, and confirm that action with the rights holder that reported it.”

Another interesting statistic is that no action was taken in response to more than 31% of the 224,464 requests. This means that none of the content highlighted in these notices was removed. These rejections could be the result of an abusive, inaccurate or incomplete request, for example.

Copyright removals



In addition to takedown requests on Facebook itself, the company also shared the same data for Instagram. The numbers are roughly a third of Facebook’s, with 70,008 requests and 685,996 removed posts or items during the first half of 2017.

The social media giant stresses that it operates with the best interests of copyright holders and users in mind. For copyright holders, the takedown process is optimized and improved where possible. At the same time, the company aims to educate users who make an occasional mistake, to prevent further problems.

Facebook users who continue to post or link to pirated content repeatedly, will be dealt with eventually though. The company regularly disables accounts, removes pages, and deletes groups to stop persistent infringers.

“In addition to removing reported content, we disable the accounts of repeat infringers in appropriate circumstances. Our repeat infringer policy applies to IP violations committed via Facebook profiles and Instagram accounts, including copyright, trademark and counterfeit,” the company writes.

This is likely the reason why several pages of pirate sites disappeared from the social media platform in recent years. Interestingly, there appears to be little to stop these repeat infringers from signing up again and starting over.