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Google Censors Abu Ghraib Images [updated]

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the smell-the-scent-of-karl-rove dept.

Mihg writes "Try searching Google Images for abu ghraib, lynndie england, or Lynndie's boyfriend charles graner and note how you don't get any pictures of US soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners of war. Now try it with some of their competitors, like AltaVista, Lycos, or Yahoo!. Google used to be able to find them, as is discussed in this AnandTech forum thread." I'm guessing that this is another case of our administration confusing "National Security" with "Politically Undesirable". Update: 11/07 20:18 GMT by P : Google has a reasonable explanation.

5 of 731 comments (clear)

  1. The Abu Ghraib Coloring Book by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/11504468/

    A small coloring book of images from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

    What do you know about Abu Ghraib? What do you know about coloring books? What do you know about teaching conformity? About desensitization? About media and artist exploitation of suffering for financial gain. This swell coloring book wraps all that and more into nine pages that you can color yourself!

  2. Re:Freedom by vrimj · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Of course Google can censor what they like, but it is approprate to find such instances and call them on it. Censorship calls in to question Googles reliablity as an information provider and thus need to be reported on and highlighted.

    I do not think anyone is saying they can't do this, they are only pointing out that as customers of Googles service they find it disturbing

  3. It is about time! by mat+catastrophe · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I tried to submit this as an AskSlashdot feature on where to turn when Google's policies censor searches you want weeks ago. Thanks for finally running something on this.

    I think it is high time that people woke up to what google is doing out there. We can talk a big game about google "being a privately held company" and "freedom to do what they want" and whatnot, but it is seriously frightening to me exactly what it is that they want to do to the internet, especially when they are not too terribly forthcoming about what they want.

    Do any of you all use an alternate search engine? If so, post it and let us all get away from google. We claim that decentralized data is what we love the internet for, yet we all clamor to a single search engine for that data. It's incongruous and seemingly dissonant to do this.

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  4. Re:Official Respons from Google. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Your image index is not updated as frequently as it should be, eh? Then why do searches for events such as "halloween 2004" -- which happened much more recently than the prison abuse -- show up just fine?
    halloween 2004
    We take this kind of stuff very seriously too, you know.

  5. To those who still don't believe it by ESqVIP · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Well, I'm buying it.

    My main reason is that when I do a Google Images search, the number of 404s I get when trying to see the actual pictures is fairly high; depending on the search, I think I already got over 50% broken links.

    So, the indication that Google Images' index is outdated does make sense to me. Just like the guy that reported his Morgan Webb picture is still indexed "7 months after it was removed".

    Now moving on, I'll happily wait for this update, so the image search gets useful again and returns more than a bunch of outdated links.