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Google Confirms Chinese Censorship Claims
UnanimousCoward writes "A spokesperson has responded to the 'censorship' questions in this article: '"Google has decided that in order to create the best possible search experience for our mainland China users we will not include sites whose content is not accessible," company spokeswoman Debbie Frost said Friday.'" Our original article ran on Wednesday.
No use listing them if the users can't get there (that's if they're not using one of the proxy's)
Were people in China able use the google cache to circumvent the governmental censorship? If that's the case, it seems that leaving the service active would provide a "better experience" to me.
Google, as much as we love it, is a priviate company, and they have to abide by the laws, regulations and codes of conduct in forign countries, whose markets they wish to enter.
Don't get upset with goodle over cencorship, get upset with the government who's laws they must abide.
In nature, there are neither rewards or punishments, there are only consequences.
No, not really. However, how responsible should Google be in fighting oppression in other countries?
"Do no evil", but does that mean to fight against evil whenever possible? I don't think Google has any right, let alone responsibility, to make a stand against the Chinese government. If the socialists in that country see fit to regulate the media to the extent that massive nation-wide filters need to be erected to keep "bad" things out, then Google (an American company) has no business telling them they are wrong.
The internet is international and some nations prefer to keep some of the worst areas out of the hands of their publics. Is that such a wrong thing? Isn't it more wrong to hand over porn to the kiddies via a web search than it is to filter it out?
Dancin Santa
There is a use to listing censored sites - so that people in China can know what's being withheld from them. (In the dubious words of Rumsfeld - listing censored sites makes them known unknowns rather than unknown unknowns....) A precursor to any sort of political change that enhances liberty is knowing that your freedom is being curtailed - and to what degree. I would say that Google is, in a limited way, enhancing China's ability to present a false picture of the world to its people.
... is silent censorship. And that is the kind of censorship that I find the most frightening about the digital age.
When you censor a physical document, it has to go somewhere. You have to take it, you have to steal it, you have to burn it, etc. On the web, a page that is gone is just gone, quietly and painlessly, with only perhaps a few broken links to show that it was ever there. Google may think those broken links are just an annoyance, but in truth they are all that seperates the futile censorship that regimes have practiced since civilization began from 1984.
If the Chinese government wants to censor sites, then we cannot stop them. Since they claim that they are doing it for the good of their own people, then they can have that discussion with those people, and we should not be accomplices to sweeping it under the rug.
The sad thing is that Google already have a precedent here: the way they mark search results that have been censored due to the DMCA (cf this). If they truly believed in "not being evil" they would do the same thing with Chinese news: place a disclaimer that some results have been removed because the news sources are available in China. Leave it to CG to explain why.
I know that there's more to this issue than algorithmic accuracy, and it's easy to say that Google shouldn't be doing China's work for them, but given that Google's a good search engine, and its availabilty is accordingly boon to free speech, even if its coverage isn't comprehensive, it's better than it not being available at all. It's notable that they've not promised to create any new censorship, only to "respect" existing censorship.
Wikileaks, no DNS
Doing no evil doesn't necessarily mean Google has to be the progressive cause for change," Li said. "(In China), they are saying, 'This is the law of the land, and there is nothing we can do to change it.'"
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
place a checkbox in the advanced search options:
[ ] display search results your government wont allow you to view.
-- john
Google does not only do this in China. In Germany, national socialism is largely forbidden, so the well-known NS/WP site stormfront.org is blocked. Try this link from German google, and notice how it claims to find no matches on stormfront.org. The same search on American google.com returns 53,500 matches.
If Google indexed banned sites, then they would still be available via Google's cache.
Nope. China already blocks Google's cache, as well as most proxies they can find.
Would it be better if China took Google offline entirely?
Not from their point of view. It's a too obvious a form of censorship. They want to maintain the illusion of freedom as much as possible. That's why they don't want Google listing these banned pages to begin with; it makes the censorship more obvious.
I bet Google did this to avoid being blocked themselves. The obvious, non-cowardly solution, would be to present the "blocked" links in a way that identifies them as blocked. This would be doubly informative, for it would show the Chinese user what he or she could access once their oppressive, human-rights violating government is replaced (or, once they are able to emigrate); and, it would quantify the results more appropriately. How long before Google filters U.S. results for politically-appropriate content?
I knew of a student from mainland China who lived at the prime of communism in the 80s. Today he's a U.S citizen. If there is one thing for sure... he can't believe the difference in American TV and internet news.
On TV we censor so damn much, but everything's fair game on the internet. And that's great. Google is now playing axis of evil. The last place a student from China could find real content is now being censored.
Something like 65%? Oh, you mean outside the U.S.? I have no idea....
http://www.rootstrikers.org/