Surprising Extent Of China Google Censorship
I've been commenting on and refining some of the analysis of Philipp Lenssen's tests of China censored Google pages. The basic result turns out to be that since China bans some very popular domains from Google (e.g. news.bbc.co.uk, geocities.com, angelfire.com) in their entirety, many Google searches have a least one result censored on the first page. The numbers of initial pages affected is quite large, when searching for common words.
Related material echo:
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=18015"
By Seth Finkelstein | posted in google | on June 18, 2006 06:59 PM (Infothought permalink)15 June 2006 Reporters Without Borders / Internet Freedom desk CHINA
YAHOO! CLEAR WORST OFFENDER IN CENSORSHIP TESTS ON SEARCH ENGINES Reporters Without Borders said it found Yahoo! to be the clear worst offender in censorship tests the organisation carried out on Chinese versions of Internet search engines Yahoo!, Google, MSN as well as their local competitor Baidu.
I just wanted to say that I'm glad you linked to that other article citing Yahoo as the worst offender when it comes to censorship in China. I think it's important to remember that any organization wanting to do business in China has to play by that government's rules. This is not a Google-is-a-sellout-to-censorship issue; it's much larger than that.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bradlee/
JIM LEHRER: You've said also that all presidents lie. Do you really mean that literally?
BEN BRADLEE: Yeah, I think they do. I think they do. And they lie because they don't search out the truth. They get involved in incidents that do not have a clear answer and in the process of explaining those or trying to avoid those, they say things that aren't true. Now, we don't like to call those lies, maybe because it isn't quite bold enough. It isn't quite obvious enough.
JIM LEHRER: People ask people who interview people on television all the time why they don't ask them--when they ask a question, they hear an answer back that they know is wrong, they don't lean over and say, liar. It's not what we do.
BEN BRADLEE: You'd get a lot of listeners if you do.
JIM LEHRER: Yeah, yeah, right. A lot of people don't want journalism anymore.
BEN BRADLEE: I think the, I think the answer for newspapers is because the--we're losing that young audience. I don't think, I don't think people get hooked on newspapers, some never obviously, but until much later in their life.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bradlee/transcript_ethics.html