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Google Complies with Law, Excludes 'controversial' Sites
YDdraig writes "To conform with some French and German laws, Google has removed listings for over 100 sites which it believes to be anti-abortion, pro-Nazi, white supremacist or anti-semitic. They're not keen to talk about it either, saying merely: 'As a matter of company policy we do not provide specific details about why or when we removed any one particular site from our index.'" Noted from Declan's articles: This is Google.de and Google.fr, and is done to be in compliance with those countries laws. Because, of course, not being able to talk about something makes it less attractive right? And drugs being illegal makes it less attractive for kids too, right? *sigh* Update: 10/24 13:55 GMT by H : Thanks to Declan for providing the linkage to his News.com original story which has more links then the ZDNet UK one.
OK, there'd be a lot to say about the reason a site should be considered as controversial but their light quantity just sounds like to me they actually visited these to ensure they would not blacklist a legitimate site...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
My guess is that there will be many here who will moan over Google being stupid, but of course they are doing the right thing following the law of each country in this case.
If the laws are wrong both Germany and France are fairly democratic countries so advocate to change the laws instead. Make it legal to spread nazi-propaganda i Germany etc...
Maybe the French should try re-reading the works of French, postmodern writer/philosopher Michel Foucault, who wrote that repression of ideas and restriction of speech leads to discourse. France should know better. Now, Germany on the other hand . . .
What prevents French people from just using Google.com ?
Yeah well freedom of speech ends where you step on other people's rights, like those anti-abortion sites inciting people to kill abortion doctors or Nazis who want to gas the jews.
I agree that it's a problematic issue. Note that freedom of the press is not the same as freedom of speech, by the way. You can report all you want about Nazis who want to gas jews, but as soon as you advocate it yourself, then you're in deep trouble, and in my humble opinion rightfully so.
Google's a target, that's for sure, it's a drawback to being highly successful. But Google has to follow the laws of each nation it is based in. So of course Google.de and Google.fr had to remove the links. It *could* make a stand, and challenge the laws, but does it really want to put the time and effort and money into such a legal challenge? These laws have stood, what, almost 60 years? Take a look at ChillingEffects.com and see how many cease and desists Google has to wade through... for simply having a link to a controversial site.
Julie Moult is an idiot.
So it probably sounded like a good idea to filter out Nazis...everyone hates Nazis right? (except the Nazis) While we're at it let's censor White Supremicists, cause we all hate them too.
The list of what's censored is in an of itself controversial. For example, pro-Fascist sites are censored... what about pro-Communist sites? After all, Stalin killed 20M or more of his own people in his purges compared with 6M in the Holocaust. Anti-abortion sites are censored, what about pro-Catholic? After all, Catholics oppose abortion.
Note that I'm not claiming to be pro or anti anything in this post, I'm merely pointing our some gaping inconsistencies that render the policy meaningless, and hence probably mere cheap political point-scoring rather than a serious attempt to suppress hate-crime or make the world a better place. Assuming you believe in hate-crime; my personal opinion is that it matters little to the victim what the criminal's motivation was.
Even more meaningless than it would be if French and German users couldn't simply point their browsers at google.ca.
Welcome to democracy, people. France and Germany are both democratic countries that have decided (along with most of Europe) that racist speech is not acceptable in society. The government isn't trying to dictate what people think, or say privately, but in public we expect people to behave in a certain way (eg. masturbation in public is not okay).
It saddens me when I see white supremacists in the USA campaigning outside schools for the removal of black teachers and children etc. If we need laws to stop that kind of abuse, then we have no other option. Your freedom to speech stops when it promotes violence and hatred towards other people. Don't forget that even in the USA theres no such thing as freedom of speech - try writing an "ANTHRAX-HOWTO" or setting up a pro-terrorism website and see how long it lasts. Its just a matter of drawing the line somewhere, and in Europe we draw the line closer at protecting personal freedoms - the freedom to live in peace is more important than the freedom to kill/promote killing.
Greetings,
:/
First of all, I absolutely agree with you. Censorship is never the right way to go after ideologies of debatable morality. The only thing it's gonna achieve is make its proponents feel persecuted, and as such, it legitimates their views.
Thing is, you absolutely CAN'T touch those anti-racism/antisemitism/whatever laws. It's a very, very touchy issue over here, and some organisations will scream bloody murder if you ever even want to open the debate about it. (Note that it's the same organisation -- *not* the government -- that had the Yahoo auctions censored, for example). If you want to open the debate then you're obviously a racist antisemitic extreme-right wing nazi and should be dragged out and shot. So the debate is never opened. Heck, Sharon called Chirac an antisemite when France stopped supporting his attacks on Palestine.
And it is growing into a REAL problem. People are so afraid of being thought of the extreme-right that they'll never speak up, but brood in their corner instead, and then (other) people act all dumbfounded when the extreme-right candidate suddenly makes it to the second turn of the presidential elections.
While opening the debate will allow to laugh the extreme-right into oblivion in a matter of minutes, to everyone's benefit. Sigh.
Oh well. Now you can mod me (-1, Flamebait) for obviously being an antisemitic nazi bastard.
(Posted anonymously, for obvious reasons -- I dared open the debate, so now I'm gonna play it safe and hide.)
Somehow this implies to me that anti-abortion views (read: pro-life, anti-murder) are supposedly "evil" just as pro-nazi views are assumed to be "evil"... at least according to the French government. Its a simple assumption to make.
First of all, nobody controls the free speech (supposedly) of US entities. Secondly, who decided that Anti-abortion, Pro-nazi propaganda is offensive? Are the french people that weak that their government decides whats offensive to them?
I happen to find pro-abortion sites offensive, but I don't rally for google to block those sites from their index! My respect of free speech and other people's opinions to be far more important that the content of their views.
So, lets think about the implications of this for a moment. The French government has the power to remove listsing from the internet's most popular search engine. Ok, so there are a couple hundred governments in the world that could do the same. [sarcasm]Wouldn't it be great if other governments hopped on the bandwagon and reduced the quality and accuracy of search results for the entire world? [/sarcasm]
What if another country decides that chickens are offensive? Do they now have the "right" to lobby Google for removal of chicken websites from the index?
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Important difference, dude... Killing of Doctors = illegal by current laws Removing a mass of fetal matter from it's unwilling host = legal by current laws (in many places) Abortion may or may not be morally corrupt, depending on your particular moral code, but there is an unambiguous fact, it's legal.
This is based on Declan's article (Hi Declan!)
I am using Opera 6.03 uner Linux.
Entering "Stormfront" in the "Internet Search" field gives me [hit n.1] "stormfront.org -- Stormfront White Pride" neo-nazi web site we all love to hate.
If I enter "http://www.google.com", I get re-directed to "http://www.google.fr" and "Stormfront" does not appear in the results anymore. Screenshots available upon request.
On the other hand, I can always go through my main (US) ISP and browse google.com without redirection.
What's the moral of the story? If you are a [French|German] neo-nazi, and you have a [French|German] ISP use Opera to go around the google limitations. Or get a USA-based ISP.
What's the moral of this moral? Geolocation does not work!!!!. Moronic solution such as this one are simply to easy to avoid. And, yes, UEJF, that one is for you.
Whether neo-nazi opinions are worth defending is left as an exercise to the reader...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Not so important difference dude. In Germany in 1944 mass killing of Jews == legal
hiding jews == illegal.
Legal does not equal right.
My personal belief is
killing doctors == wrong
Abortion == wrong
Speaking your mind on the subject == right
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Someone explain to me why Google is being slagged for removing these items from their indexes? Yes they're a popular search engine, but at what point did the idea surface that they were required to maintain some kind of free-speech or anti-censorship policy? It's their site, their database -- they can do with it whatever they want. It's also not as if Google has taken down the sites it's removing from their indexes -- as much as I object to the content those sites might have on them, they're still available for people to read.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Nazism killed a lot of people, the wish to eradicate groups of the population being an integral part of the nazi ideas.
Well, I contrasted fascism and communism, not nazism ("Hitlerism", if you will) and Stalinism.
The modern-day Left would have you believe that Hitler and Stalin were ideological enemies, but it would be far more accurate to describe them as rivals. They both ran totalitarian police states with absolute power concentrated in a single leader, both believed that the only purpose of the citizen should be to serve the state (and hence the maximum leader), both ran command economies, both had expansionist foreign policies, both persecuted ethnic minorities. The only real way to differentiate between them is that Stalin's purges killed 3-4x what Hitler's did. It is also worth noting that other self-described Communists (China, Cambodia, etc) have similar records to Stalin's.
But mysteriously, modern-day Fascists are shunned and modern-day Communists are tolerated. In fact, the same attitude should apply to them both; neither has a place in the modern world.
Google, Please remove all web pages that discusses the evil practice of commercialism.
And Christianity violates my moral beliefs, so they must remove those pages too.
Only kidding, but you see my point i hope. This sets a BAD precedent.. a really really bad one.
This will open the flood gates on mass censorship.
---- Booth was a patriot ----