How Google assist Government Censorship in China(2)
Posted by chinaview on September 10, 2006
Human Rights Watch, August 10, 2006–
Passive censorship in Chinese-language Google News: In September 2004 the launch of a Chinese-language edition of Google News also marked Google’s first step in the direction of compromise with Chinese censorship practices. When the user typed in words or phrases that yielded blocked results, Chinese Google News did not display those results (see Figs 12 & 13 for a comparison of a search for “Tiananmen massacre” conducted on regular Google News and Chinese Google News in October 2005).The filtering was being done by the Chinese government and Chinese ISPs, not directly by Google. But Google opted not to display links on Chinese Google News that would lead to error pages or termination of the session.
In response to criticism by human rights and free speech groups, Google responded on its official blog:
For Internet users in China, we had to consider the fact that some sources are entirely blocked. Leaving aside the politics, that presents us with a serious user experience problem. Google News does not show news stories, but rather links to news stories. So links to stories published by blocked news sources would not work for users inside the PRC — if they clicked on a headline from a blocked source, they would get an error page. It is possible that there would be some small user value to just seeing the headlines. However, simply showing these headlines would likely result in Google News being blocked altogether in China.114
Figure 13: Filtered search on Chinese Google News: “Tiananmen Massacre”
(to be cont’d…)
