Slashdot Mirror
Does Google Censor Chinese News?
mOoZik writes "A story carried by New Scientist suggests that Google might be playing into the hands of the Chinese government by blocking certain news stories which may be deeded inappropriate. Some users recently reported that Google's Chinese news search returned different results depending when they searched using a computer based outside of China. The claims were substantiated by researchers who connected to computers inside the country. Read on and decide for yourself."
I'm sorry but I don't see why this is such a surprise. If you're a multinational company and you set-up office in the United Kingdom then you have to adhere to European and UK law and if you set-up office in Turkey you have to adhere to Turkish
law. So what's the problem with adhering to Chinese law if you set up office in China?
Now you might not like the political stance of the Chinese government but that's your business after all it's their country and their jurisdiction. If you don't want to adhere to their laws don't set-up office there.
The principle motive of any company is to maximise its profits. If Google thinks working in China will enhance their profitability and they don't mind the draconian laws then it makes sense for them to enter that market.
We should not expect companies to make political statements - we have politicians for that - Companies are driven by different forces than politics and in the highly competitive market of internet search taking such a stance could damage the company immensely.
Simon.
If they don't play into the hands of the Chinese government, they risk having all of google.com blocked. If they do, they are seen as "censors" and "pawns" of the same government. Unfortunately money and page views seem to trump over principles when given a choice. Remember, there's always the proxy server approach for whoever wants to see the "uncensored" news.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
I wonder how much google supresses certain news stories that the US fed deems innappropriate?
From what I understand, Google already censors their content in other countries like France and Germany. This is only making the news because it's big bad China. Although it kind of does blow apart this image that they like to present as being crusaders of free speech.
-- Knowledge shared is power lost. -- Aleister Crowley
it's good business. Otherwise Google news might be blocked from China altogether and Google would lose access to a growing market. Corporations have always got along with authoritarian regimes, ever since the Nazis used IBM punch cards to tally the death counts.
The real question is why people expect a different standard of behaviour from Google than from other companies. I mean, you guys don't really believe that "don't be evil" stuff, do you? Google is Just Another Company.
Google already censors search results for e.g. Germany, due to sentences spoken out by some German court.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
You would be correct if Google were selling razor blades, cheese or any other physical product. What they are doing is creating a news resource. Personally, I don't like the fact that a company which wears its ethics on its sleeve, so to mangle the metaphor, by stating "Don't be evil" as its company motto would self censor to fit into the demands of a foreign government.
It is the precedent that is important here. When you ignore this, you erode the fundamental freedoms that form the basis of the Internet.
Meine Schwester ist sehr, sehr reizvoll - Nietzsche
Doesn't anybody else think that ever since Google announced a few new services that SlashDot is suddenly carrying stories that suggest that Google is evil?
Frankly, in this case it is quite clearly the Chinese government that is responsible for this. If Google doesn't comply, their service will be blocked from China such as they have done in ths past. If by "playing into the hands of the Chinese Government" you mean that they follow the rules of that country (just like they do in the U.S.), then I suppose they are. But by that argument, Google is clearly playing into the hands of the U.S. Government too.
Sunny
Be my Friend
it is understanable that google leave out those site. when people use the google chinese to search news site, who will most likely to come from China. even if google return the "correct" result, if the chinese goverment have already block the site, they will be clicking on the dead link.
if google don't take out those site, then it will in turn hurt google.
I am not saying it is a good thing, I personally don't agree on internet censoring, but that's how china work, it is something that won't change in a short while.
that should read "don't be evil, that's a job for the guys who machine-gunned their own students protesting for democracy"
you somehow seem to think idealism is achievable in such an environment
you should be condemning the chinese govt, not google
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is not the first time that Google has imposed some censorship over its search engine. Check out this article at WorldNetDaily: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTI CLE_ID=26819
When Google started out, they seemed to be a refreshing alternative to other larger corporate sites. Google is now becoming part of corporate America. With that, we can expect to see a more "tame" Google geared toward minimizing the making of waves for the purpose of maintaining investor confidence and ensuring a steady profit.
Is it "selling out"? Perhaps, but I think that this is the sort of thing that we can expect as a company expands and grows.
Get some.
here it is
fifteen jugglers, five believers
You'd figure they could put some specific charges with dates and the precise content that wasn't available. I love the way the Slashdot summary says "read on to make your own decision" but the linked article doesn't actually contain any more detail than the summary.
How we know is more important than what we know.
But certainly the news portal itself seems either biased, or US news really is that bad.
I have noticed if I search for a story I will find it, but the google portal does give a good indication of what the US is seeing.
For example Bushes war records. You check the news/search engine all you find is about the CBS documents.
However if you were to dig more you would find that a judge has ordered the release of the originals (ref: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6022115/).
I've wondered if this is a new system of polluting the news on the net. As it is harder to control stories but easy to bury them.
It's not just China !
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
In the tradition of misleading Slashdot summaries, this one contains only the accusation, not the defence. Here's Google's reply from the article:
"In order to create the best possible news search experience for our users, we sometimes decide not to include some sites, for a variety of reasons," says a statement issued by the company. "These sources were not included because their sites are inaccessible."
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
...and confirm what the top post pointed out - I'd like to add that Google, as an aggregator, isn't a news service. Google trawls and clips...that's all.
Anyone not aware enough to find other sources from time to time, deserves the narrowness they assume, whether it concerns Asia or Europe or NA.
Take responsibility for your own interpretation...after all, we were taught in school how American newspapers bury or bias 'news' by placing some on the front or back pages, while other stories get jammed against an inside margin. To repeat...don't be surprised when your 'news' is crafted by the source(s) you use.
Note that I don't think this is right, and the current internet censorship really sucks, neither does it work --- new sites containing western political views spring up every day and they can't censor them one by one. The recent efforts against porn sites are even more laughable, considering that it is still hard to find a news site in China that does not contain sexual content deemed inappropriate for children by most parents. Hopefully some time in the future they will admit that such efforts are useless and use the money on places that really need them (such as some poor rural areas).
However, I feel that it's better for the chinese people to get some access to google, rather than none at all. The Chinese government would not hesitate to completely remove access to google.com. This would greatly trouble a great many number of chinese people.
Some (censored) google is better than no google.
Yahoo got in trouble as an auction site they run had items on it which are illegal in France. Maybe Google are just trying to comply with local laws rather than be censored completely...
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Many of us on Slashdot use Google very frequently (almighty god, give us this day our daily byte...) to find all kinds of information including stuff that we need and use to make our livelihood. We also use google to keep up with the news. Mostly, we find what we need if it is out there on the net.
This easy access to information on the net seems to have distorted our expectations somewhat. We expect, nay demand, that Google find everything there is to find, always, correctly, without fear or favour, without regard to consequences that might affect Google itself, without consideration for the laws of the many lands that Google serves - in short we want Google to be a completely good and benevolevent omniscient oracle. Googles 'do ot be evil" motto is partly to blame for this - especially to people unfamiliar with the context of the phrase. I don't think the motto calls on Google to commit hara-kiri to assert its fealty to freedom and the protection of all good in the universe. I do not expect Google to take on the Death Star in a battered Millenium Falcon. I do expect, and rightfully, that google will not screw me over by selling my personal information, by setting terms and conditions that take away my ability to use it in conjunction with any other service or sofware I want, by taking away my right to choose, by deliberately and maliciously determining what I see in order to increase their profit.
Unfortunately, the same omniscient hold that Google has on the information on the net makes it easier for oppressive governments to control information. Previously, where such regimes had to track and control a million individual sources of information, they can now achieve that control by influencing Google. Since Google is subject to the laws of the countries where it operates (GASP!), it has no choice but to comply when threatened with complete blocking of its services in e.g. China or France. Remember the case of Yahoo! and neo-Nazi material? You can bet that Yahoo! will pull that information now that it is clear the first amendment will not protect them from legal process in France or Germany in respect of that material.
So, the question is, do we give up on google altogether? Of course not - it has for better or worse, grown into an extension of our memory, we google as easily as we breathe - my three year old daughter knows that google will help her find her favorite cartoon sites! What we need is a tempering of the expectation that we have of Google. Get used to the idea - you will need it more in the days to come, Google is merely another tool you have at your disposal. It is NOT the be all and end all of all known human wisdom.
See that long UID - that's what you get for lurking too long
One of the pillars of Google's trusty algorithms is finding what sites link to URLs, that's how it ranks (nay?). If it is illegal for ISPs to provide links to said URLs, wouldn't they not be in the China link database anyhow? And if China linked to them because it compared databases with those of other countries, wouldn't it be getting normal people into trouble by serving them links to illegal material, whether or not they knew it to be such?
It just seems like a touchy subject, and I think a lot of people like to jump up and down assuming other places/countries are peopled by others like ourselves.
Google removed from sites from its' index some time ago due to legal pressure from the Scientology movement using the legal system of the United States of America.
Is this really news? Almost every country in the world censors now - there are few countries left where you can say anything you want. Welcome to the future, the way it has always been.
Its really a business decision - if the government of a country whos internet population is over 60 million demands that you stick a few lines of code in your software or they will block you totally, what are you gonna do? sure you're aiding and abetting crimes against humanity, but business is business and 60 million people is allot of business, its not like other companies don't do it - IBM supplied counting machines to the Nazis, Cisco supplies network equipment to the Great Firewall of China.
Also what exactly did they proove here? it seems a bit of a bad explination, if google was providing different chinese content based on your position relative to the firewall then that would mean the firewall was doing the censoring right? "Google China" means that google has determined you are in China from your IP or the address you typed - if the news was the same on both sides then that would be dodgy because it would mean the firewall wasnt changing anything so google must be?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Given China's behaviour with respect to Tibet and Taiwan, I would say that any company that specifically re-enforces the policy of the government through censorship has no more right to claim to not be evil than Fox News has to claim to be fair and balanced.
So consider the case of underage pornography (something that the US government does censor). Should Google not censor it?
All governments that I know of do *some* censorship -- the question is just to what degree.
I mean, I think that the people running China are a bunch of shortsighted assholes, but they aren't qualitatively different from other governments -- just, perhaps, quantitatively. Given that we listen to US media, we hear a lot about how awful China is doing.
On the other hand, the US Iraq occupational authority did not allow freedom of press, and in fact shut down a number of media sources for criticizing them (newspapers and the only Arab-language news network). Naturally *that* didn't get much air time -- but godless communist oppressors censoring critical media is acceptable and *required* content for us to hear about.
May we never see th
Company chooses to make money over being banned shock!
Google is in the market to make money. They are a buisiness that is what they do. If they think by sensoring google news for chinese users that they cah make money, then yes they will be sensoring to there hearts content. Don't be fooled into thinking they are anything but that, a buisiness.
Don't get me wrong, i like unbiased uncensored news as much as the next person, but its obvious that google feels they can make money otherwise, so is it really so shocking?
Just wait a few years and the US will start censoring websites. In the run-up to the Iraq war US news outlets didn't ask any questions. Americans who looked at cbc.ca or bbc.co.uk realized the world was against the war (for good reason). Only seems reasonable, for homeland security reasons, that Homeland security dept should not allow Americans to read evil foreign websites in the run-up to the Iran war.
I love how people are bitching about how Google is at fault for possible complying with the Chinese Gov't.
And that Google's policy is Don't be evil, unless you have to...
But no one is bitching about the Chinese Government... What's up with that? It's the Chinese Government making these policies, and if google wants in, then they must comply. Simple.
If the United States Government required Google to filter out all READ: EVIL CONTENT, then the same folks would be up in arms over the US Gov't, and not google.
I guess out of sight out of mind eh? Or maybe it's just expected from Communists? I can't say why... More of an observation, but I do find it interesting that people are reacting harder on Google then the Government.
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
Accomodating the PRC's censorship regime doesn't do one bit of good for the Chinese in the long run--isolating China and letting the PRC be replaced by its people was the correct path, but it wasn't very good for corporate bottom lines, so they're a "Most Favored Nation" while they censor what their people can read, torture Christains, and oppress the Falun Gong.
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
China may be stupid and have draconian laws. But in my opinion, and objectively, it is as much wrong to ignore laws in china if you do business in china as it is to ignore USA-laws when doing business in USA.
If I don't agree to some laws in the USA, because they don't match my morale, it does not give me any right to ignore them. Likewise it is for google in China.
It is simple to understand the issue by this reversed question: Should china ignore some laws in USA, if they do not agree with their morale/ideas?
Google does the right thing.
A friend of mine just returned from a trip to China where he was working for 3 months. He said that nobody there had ever heard of the Tiananmen Square massacre. When he explained what he knew about it, the Chinese people he was talking to just said, "Anyone could make up stories about our government." He tried going back to his hotel room and searching for the information, but he couldn't get any results.
What bothered me more was a conversation I was recently having with an American friend of mine (I'm Canadian) over a beer. He said that 9/11 was the first time that the U.S. had been the subject of an unprovoked attack on its own soil since the British attacked the U.S. in the war of 1812. I was sitting in stunned silence after he said that. I know for a fact that the U.S. burned Toronto (then called York) to the ground before the British attacked Washington. How could that be considered unprovoked? So, given that we're both products of our respective country's state funded education system, it gave me a queasy feeling to say the least.
The attitude of the US is sickening, with utter disregard to sovereignity of other nations
I assume you are refering to the sovereignty of Afghanistan and Iraq. By harboring UBL after 9/11 the Taliban was complicit in an act of war. Perhaps you think the U.S. should have entered into peace talks with Mullah Omar? As for Iraq, Saddam's regime murdered 400,000+ of his fellow citizens, violated the sovereignty of neighbors Iran and Kuwait, renegged on a surrender agreement, defied UN resolutions for 12 years, and bought off security counsel members though the "oil for food" racket. I think the U.S. has shown remarkable restraint.
an ill wind that blows no good
Thanks for your anti-west sentiment, but what about russia? japan? china? the Islamic empire? Shaka zulu? Genghis Khan? present day somalian warlords. present day egypt, iran, syria? 1951 North Korea?
conquest is a Western invention? my ass it is.
"Nobody writes jokes in base 13." - Douglas Adams
I keep seeing this "they can be sued" phrase pop up, and it's time to put a stake through its heart.
a tions/articles/tatelbaum_sarbanes.asp/
1. A company can be sued by a shareholder for just about anything they do. All it takes is profits being below a prediction (or some half-assed guesstimate), and someone will point to a particular corporate action as being the alledged cause. Most (90% or so in an average year) such suits are unsuccessful. Google can still be sued for working with the PRC's laws, if profits fall (even in some other division, as that could be called a PR backlash!), or for not investing agressively enough in China, if profits fall, or for not dropping this silly internet stuff and becoming a buggy-whip manufacturer, if profits fall.
2. Google is not a majority held public company. Lawsuits would be coming from minority stock holders. Minority stock holders have a steep hurdle to prove in any suit - that is they have to prove that they don't have the ulterior motive of trying to make their minority of votes (or their non-voting influence) steer the board of directors on an extra-legal issue.
3. US law simply doesn't say what you are misquoting it as saying. The law actually requires any corporation to abide by some pretty strict standards of ethics that often go against maximizing shareholder value, as in these examples:
First,
http://www.business-ethics.com/current.htm/
alwys has some examples of companies that have done the right thing, (in the opinion of the editors). You can look at what they did, and decide for yourself if they were under pressure of lawsuits or not.
Then there's the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which is intended to have a positive impact on accountability, and is sometimes misconstrued to support your position. Most significantly (for this discussion), the Act imposes new responsibilities on CEOs and CFOs who could face criminal sanctions for false certification of financial reports. This was done by congress, because so FEW shareholder lawsuits against corporations were successful, and it was deemed necessary to give suing stockholders some "teeth" in a few cases of outright fraud, sufficient in itself to lead to criminal charges.
http://www.genusresources.com/site/content/public
Will go to a prety good overview of Sarbanes-Oxley, and why it DOESNT leave companies wide open to any lawsuit some shareholder attempts.
You could also read up on The U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. It prohibits giving anything of value, directly or indirectly, to foreign government officials or foreign political candidates in order to obtain or retain business. It is strictly prohibited to make illegal payments to government officials of any country. Given the PRCs poor worldwide reputation on this, Google management could easily win just about any shareholder lawsuit, simply by saying bribery became a major issue.
(I give up. If I'm gonna keep biting on these legal related posts, I might as well change my sig to IANAL).
Who is John Cabal?