Frightening Look into Censorship
Posted by Scott Hughes Mon, 30 Jan 2006 00:45:00 GMT
via NoodleFood:
What does Google’s collusion with the Chinese government to censor its search results mean? It’s the difference between fact and illusion.
I found the difference between those two search results to be quite disturbing. To recap (if China is liberated tomorrow, I’ll look like an idiot when those links don’t work), if you search for “tiananmen” on the Chinese Google image search page, you get pictures from happy tourists and travel websites. If you execute the same search on our Google image search page, you get pictures of brave Tiananmen Tank Guy (the student who stood alone in front of a row of tanks sent to quell a student demonstration).
Here’s some more I tried:
Chinese Arrest and Chinese Arrest Censored
Chinese Arrest Censored
Chinese Dissent and Chinese Dissent Censored
Chinese Dissent Censored
Chinese Activist and Chinese Activist Censored
Chinese Activist Censored
Perhaps the most disturbing are images of members of the banned religion Falun Gong… Pay close attention to the pictures of Falun Gong practicioners, specifically the healthy physical condition of any practicioner that happens to be shown on the Chinese site.
Falun Gong and Falun Gong Censored
Falun Gong Censored
I don’t know how much you can fault Google for this. They can make a lot of money in China, and that’s the price of doing business there. Giving the Chinese people easier access to information than they had before can only help, so it’s a limited win-win. The only people in the way of making it a complete win for the Chinese people would be the Chinese government, not Google. It’s not the fault of American businesses that the Chinese people haven’t overthrown the tyrants yet.
Update, 1/30/2006
I corrected the search links to the Chinese Google home page. While constructing the links, I mistakenly thought that Google may be changing the results based on the country of origin of the IP address that was conducting the search. I though that appending “&cr=countryCN” to the url would fix it, but this actually tells Google to search only the websites that are hosted in China. After modifying the links, the differences between the two searches becomes very subtle. It appears that I did not find any other keywords that were being censored. Tiananmen is the only obvious one, and I would’ve thought Falun Gong would’ve been on the list but the results are identical.
Speaking practically, if Google is not filtering by the IP address of the originator, the censorship of whatever keywords on the Chinese home page makes no difference… Since a Chinese citizen can just choose to use the US (or standard) home page for Google and get all of the results back.
Update Again, 1/31/2006
Apparently, there were some early issues with capitalization on the chinese search page, but Google has fixed those now. I realize now I have no idea what the “cr=” in the url means. If you go to http://images.google.cn and search for keyword “Falun Gong”, you will get censored results. Go into your address bar and remove the “&cr=countryCN” from the url that was generated by Google’s Chinese search page, and you will now see the uncensored results. Is this all the Chinese citizens have to do to see all the results? You know, this whole “censoring the web” idea isn’t making a lot of sense.
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