Google reports 'alarming'
rise in censorship by governments
Search engine company has
said there has been a troubling increase in requests to remove political
content from the internet
Dominic Rushe in New York The
Guardian, Sunday 17 June 2012
There has been an alarming
rise in the number of times governments attempted to censor the internet in
last six months, according to a report from Google.
Since the search engine
last published its bi-annual transparency report, it said it had seen a
troubling increase in requests to remove political content. Many of these
requests came from western democracies not typically associated with
censorship.
It said Spanish regulators
asked Google to remove 270 links to blogs and newspaper articles critical of
public figures. It did not comply. In Poland, it was asked to remove an article
critical of the Polish agency for enterprise development and eight other
results that linked to the article. Again, the company did not comply.
Google was asked by
Canadian officials to remove a YouTube video of a citizen urinating on his
passport and flushing it down the toilet. It refused.
Thai authorities asked
Google to remove 149 YouTube videos for allegedly insulting the monarchy, a
violation of Thailand's lèse-majesté law. The company complied with 70% of the
requests.
Pakistan asked Google to
remove six YouTube videos that satirised its army and senior politicians. Google
refused.
UK police asked the
company to remove five YouTube accounts for allegedly promoting terrorism.
Google agreed. In the US most requests related to alleged harassment of people
on YouTube. The authorities asked for 187 pieces to be removed. Google complied
with 42% of them.
In a blog post, Dorothy
Chou, Google's senior policy analyst, wrote: "Unfortunately, what we've
seen over the past couple years has been troubling, and today is no different.
When we started releasing this data, in 2010, we noticed that government
agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove political
content that our users had posted on our services. We hoped this was an
aberration. But now we know it's not.
"This is the fifth
data set that we've released. Just like every other time, we've been asked to
take down political speech. It's alarming not only because free expression is
at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not
suspect – western democracies not typically associated with censorship."
Over the six months
covered by the latest report, Google complied with an average of 65% of court
orders, as opposed to 47% of more informal requests.
Last month Google
announced it was receiving more than one million requests a month from
copyright owners seeking to pull their content from the company's search
results.
Fred von Lohmann, Google's
senior copyright counsel, said copyright infringement was the main reason
Google had removed links from search terms.
He said the company had
received a total of 3.3m requests for removals on copyright grounds last year,
and was on course to quadruple that number this year. The company complied with
97% of requests.
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