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Facebook has released its international transparency report for the first six months of 2014, and, expectedly, it doesn’t make India look like the beacon of free speech and expression.

With as many as 4960 pieces of content being restricted in six months, India beats all competition hands down. The next two countries on the list – Turkey and Pakistan – saw 1893 and 1773 content restrictions respectively. As far as government requests go, the United States of America leads with 15,433 requests pertaining to information about 23,667 user accounts.  The Indian government, during the same period, made 4,559 requests for information on 5959 user accounts. Facebook complied with 50.87 per cent of those requests. Here’s a country-wise graphical breakdown of the transparency report.

While facebook’s transparency report’s numbers do paint an ominous picture of India’s Internet freedom, the report itself is rather opaque, considering there is no detail about what content was actually restricted and on what grounds. The only thing facebook provides by way of explanation is the following line:

“We restricted access in India to a number of pieces of content reported primarily by law enforcement officials and the India Computer Emergency Response Team under local laws prohibiting criticism of a religion or the state.”

While law information agency in this context would mean requests by the police on the basis of complaints filed under the country’s IT Act, the role of Computer Emergency Response Team or CERT as it is called is often understated and rarely discussed. Since facebook does not reveal particulars of the nature of complaint or complainant, it is difficult to establish with certainty whether the police or CERT were responsible for maximum requests.

However, a look at the number of cases where Section 66 A and 79 of the IT Act were invoked during the same period could give a fair indication. The number is miniscule (compared to the number of content restrictions): less than 200. So then, it is safe to assume that most of these content restriction requests were from CERT.

Facebook also has a provision that lets users “report” content. According to the company’s guidelines, when something gets reported to facebook, it reviews it and removes “anything that doesn’t follow the Facebook Community Standards”.  This is what happened when the facebook pages of the “Kiss of Love” protests in Kerala and its administrators were blocked.  The note in the transparency report though does not mention anything about such restrictions.

So what is CERT and how does it go about doing what it does?  According to its website it is the “national nodal agency for responding to computer security incidents as and when they occur”. Set up in 2004, the core responsibility of the organisation is to ensure cyber security in India in accordance with the laws of the land. While CERT primarily works to combat hacking and virus threats, the complaint form that is available on its website to report incidents informs that it also deals with “website defacement” and “social engineering”.

While the idea of a specialised agency keeping a tab on possible cyber threats is reassuring, things like “social engineering” need more accurate definitions. Even more so considering our IT law mandates prosecution on something as arbitrary as “annoyance”. Recently, a highly popular facebook page that primarily discusses scientific ideas was blocked overnight without any explanation at all.

In fact, the role of CERT in India is very unique as Pawan Duggal, an advocate who specialises in cyber law, explains: “The world over, CERTs respond to cyber emergencies, while in India it is responsible for cyber security of the country. Cyber emergency is part of cyber security, but there’s much more to the idea of cyber security.”

A transparency report is great practice, but sometimes half a picture is as good as none. Facebook’s transparency report, in its current form, is a bit like that – it seeks to inform, but fails to.