Government requests for Facebook account data were up 27 percent in the first half of 2016 compared with the second half of 2015, according to the social network?s latest Global Government Requests Report.
Deputy general counsel Chris Sonderby said in a Newsroom post that Facebook received 59,229 requests in the first six months of the year, up from 46,710 in the last six months of 2015.
Content-restriction requests plunged 83 percent, from 55,827 in the second half of 2015 to 9,663 in the first half of 2016, but Sonderby attributed the large discrepancy to requests from France regarding a single image from the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.
The top 10 countries in terms of content-restriction requests in the first six months of 2016 were:

France, 2,213
India, 2,034
Germany, 1,093 Brazil, 1,019
Israel, 962
Austria, 940
Turkey, 861
U.K., 284
Russia, 130
South Korea, 56

And the top 10 countries in terms of requests for account data were:

U.S., 23,854 from 38,951 accounts
India, 6,324 from 8,290 accounts
U.K., 5,469 from 7,199 accounts
France, 3,763 from 4,045 accounts
Germany, 3,695 from 4,599 accounts
Italy, 1,913 from 2,877 accounts
Brazil, 1,751 from 4,486 accounts
Canada, 1,004 from 1,205 accounts
Turkey, 993 from 1,200 accounts
Poland, 991 from 1,032 accounts

Sonderby wrote in the Newsroom post:
The majority of data requests we received from law enforcement in the U.S., or approximately 56 percent, contained a non-disclosure order that prohibited us from...