Google on China censorship
p2pnet.net News:- p2pnet was the first to report the continuing censorship of Google news sources inside China.
Dynamic Internet Technology (DIT) ceo Bill Xia told us that on September 15, a volunteer working with DIT’s DynaWeb noticed Google’s Chinese news returned different results depending whether the search was conducted in China or in the US.
He also said, “We were able to confirm this report through proxies in China. Search results inside China do not contain news from blocked sites such as www.epochtimes.com.au.”
We spoke with Google spokeswoman Debbie Frost, who denied claims that its Chinese service was censoring news, saying, among other things, “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”.
Google now has a blog on the subject. It reads:
There has been controversy about our new Google News China edition, specifically regarding which news sources we include. For users inside the People’s Republic of China, we have chosen not to include sources that are inaccessible from within that country.
This was a difficult decision for Google, and we would like to share the factors we considered before taking this course of action.
Google is committed to providing easy access to as much information as possible. For Internet users in China, Google remains the only major search engine that does not censor any web pages. However, it’s clear that search results deemed to be sensitive for political or other reasons are inaccessible within China. There is nothing Google can do about this.
For last week’s launch of the Chinese-language edition of Google News, we had to decide whether sources that cannot be viewed in China should be included for Google News users inside the PRC. Naturally, we want to present as broad a range of news sources as possible. For every edition of Google News, in every language, we attempt to select news sources without regard to political viewpoint or ideology. 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.
We also considered the amount of information that would be omitted. In this case it is less than two percent of Chinese news sources. On balance we believe that having a service with links that work and omits a fractional number is better than having a service that is not available at all. It was a difficult tradeoff for us to make, but the one we felt ultimately serves the best interests of our users located in China. We appreciate your feedback on this issue.
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See:-
censorship – Google helps ‘China Matrix’, p2pnet, September 20, 2004
blog – China, Google News and source inclusion, Google Blog, September 27, 2004
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If you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent website blocking outside of China.
Download it here and feel free to copy the zip and host it yourself so others can download it.
October 4th, 2004 at 4:57 pm
“We delete anything that’s obscene or denigrates gender or religion.” Sensroship? Who decides? Free is free!
October 4th, 2004 at 4:58 pm
That’s right~don’t you know.
March 3rd, 2005 at 3:15 am
I have a client who is getting word that her site cannot be viewed in China…not controversial, she simply has and sells an ESL documentary…how can I find out what is causing the restriciton so I can remove it?