Google Censoring Search Results… In Australia
Google has been in the news a lot this week as the search giant announced that it would stop the censoring of its search results in China which could lead to the service being shut down in the country entirely, and the offices closed down as it’s likely to be against the censorship heavy Chinese government.
However, it’s not China where Google have been censoring search results this week but another country that’s also quite heavily into the idea of censoring certain parts of the internet – Australia.
Google has agreed to remove the links of a website that contains racist, if satirical, views of Aboriginal Australians.
Australian user Steve Hodder-Watt found an article from Encyclopaedia Dramatica, a satirical parody of Wikipedia that often uses offense and shock value in its articles. Google has since removed the Aboriginal page from its engine, effectively leaving the article with a page rank of 0, although it hasn’t blocked other – arguably more offensive content – from search results.
Mr Hodder-Watt filed and official complaint with the Australian Human Rights Commission after viewing the page. His lawyer described the site as “one of the most offensive sorts of racial vilification you could possibly find.”
He went on to mention that you wouldn’t want children being able to find the site online.
The site could now well be banned entirely in Australia under news laws that will see the federal government creating a firewall for the country. On a technical level the firewall will be similar to the one currently used in China (and equally as ineffective, from initial reports). It will be used to filter content that the government has classed as ‘unclassifiable’.
The news comes only a few days after Google released a statement stating their intention to stop censoring their own search results in accordance to Chinese law:
“We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.”
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