Google Agrees to Censor Encyclopedia Dramatica Entry in Australia
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Their treatment of the issues betrays a astounding naivety that I find of increasing concern. On the face of it, it's always for a good cause... won't somebody think of the children! We need to censor all the bad sites on the Internet! Some guy feels slighted by a racial slur on some website that no one takes seriously! We must ban it from Google! We can't be seen to be endorsing racism!
The sentiment is always admirable but the reaction betrays an complete misunderstanding of both the online culture and the technological infrastructure that supports it.
The sad thing is I know first hand that there are people in the Australian Government who can and do give better advice that should ostensibly lead to better government decisions in the online space. It just seems like their voices are being disregarded. I suspect the main reasons for this are:
a) Certain politicians refusal to accept that the reality of the Internet does not fit their limited understanding of it.
b) Politician's desire to use the Internet as a political football.
Perhaps it really is time to move to Estonia.
I don't know if you're a Sydneysider also but I just finished finding an apartment out there, you have to have a look at this;
http://www.kv.ee/uurile-anda-uus-kahetoaline-taielikult-sisu...
Link to English version is top right of the page, 7500 Kroons is $747 AUD. That price is monthly, also. I'm not sure if you're from Sydney or not but the difference in real estate prices / bang for the buck is utterly astounding to me. Probably not that big of a deal if you're someplace else here more sane, but, yeah. Also note the included amenities etc (internet, cable, phone) all in the base price.
No I'm not in Sydney (I was born there though), but I know what you mean, housing prices are pretty screwed up in many places around the country these days. I'm lucky that I found a pretty good deal for myself, but good deals are getting harder to come by, that's for sure.
Incidentally, .au is a favorite place for a lot of estonians to go for (temporary) work lately.
I do agree with you mostly, and in general I think that censorship is hardly ever good. In this particular case censorship was a force for good.
As an aside, Google was running 'used aborigines' adverts from ebay for quite a while. Do you think these adverts should also be allowed to run?
Australian society mostly takes a very dim view of racism, and especially racism towards the aborigines. Our elected representatives and the people of australia put in place laws such that this type of thing does not happen.
However the government and politicians did not make this particular case of censorship happen - the courts of law made it happen. I think most of society agree that it is a shit thing that google was doing in this instance.
Google has in place limits to stop things like pornography showing up, with it's safe search feature. This is already a form of censorship based on the values of countries like the USA.
Where do we draw the line? Obviously sociopaths shouldn't be able to say whatever they like to millions of people if their words will cause harm. How about spammers bent on selling their products? Google already blocks some of the spammers. As do they block malware serving sites, and sites that don't play by googles rules of what constitutes a good web page. Make a website more google friendly, and google will reward you with higher rankings. Put more google messages (adverts) on your pages, and get more people to see them, and google will pay you more money. How about companies abusing trademarks or abusing copyright? Are those censorship too?
Do we take the values of a multi national corporations(ie google)? Isn't that a form of cultural imperialism? What is to stop the courts abusing their power? There are many processes in place to try and let all sides of society have their input into what the courts do. What is to stop google from abusing their power and imposing their views on people who do not want them? ... glibly, I guess the answer to that is adblock.
I don't think you can have a 'censorship is always wrong' approach, or a 'totally abusing censorship in terrible ways' approach either. Reasoned arguments by courts of law are an answer - to find out where censorship is appropriate and where it is not.
The people who made that site should get a dog up em.
ok
As an aside, Google was running 'used aborigines' adverts from ebay for quite a while. Do you think these adverts should also be allowed to run?
I had not heard about this, but honestly I could not care less. If people just ignored this shit rather than pandering to the trolls, maybe there'd be no incentive for them to keep doing it.
Google has in place limits to stop things like pornography showing up, with it's safe search feature. This is already a form of censorship based on the values of countries like the USA.
And this censorship would be gone too, if it were - once again - up to me.
I think you must see where I draw the line now, i.e. I don't draw it. I can imagine that many people may think my view extreme, what about the children and all that? Well, that's what parents are for.
Whether a sociopath is able to say whatever they like on the Internet or not doesn't bother me in the slightest. Because I am an independent person who thinks for myself and feels quite comfortable judging for myself whether I wish to read the writings of a sociopath.
But more than anything else, I was actually commenting on the technological naivety of the people involved in this particular situation. Were I inclined to get a bee in my bonnet about satirical racism on the Internet, would I think having the offending material removed from Google is really any kind of satisfactory outcome? Can people still get to the offending content? Certainly. Do more people know about it now than could have ever possibly known about it previously? Yes.
My point is that no matter how tightly the Conroys of this world try to clamp down, there will always be cracks that are exploited. No matter how "clean" the feed, there's always going to something on the Internet that offends someone. Instead of worrying about where the line is drawn, we could start worrying about taking personal responsibility for ourselves and our children and leave everyone else free to do the same.
eBay has (or had?) a habit of spamming ads in Google searches that said things like "Looking for ${WHAT_YOU_SEARCHED_FOR}? Buy it new or used on eBay!", no matter what you'd searched for.
So of course people would search for all kinds of imaginary/dangerous/illegal/offensive/etc. things just to see if it would spawn any "hilarious" auto-generated eBay ads.
You are confusing their quest for relevance with censorship. Google filters out pornography from most search results in general under the assumption that pornography results are not desired. If, however, you do wish to view pornographic content, you can always search for pornography related topics directly, in which case pornographic results will be returned.
Turning on Safe Search, a user controlled option, will try to do a stronger job filtering the results. A notification is displayed that safe search is on, and the user can always choose to turn it off. This is not 'censorship', it is a useful tool for their users.
How does Google have a legal responsibility to remove a site from search results?
This issue has been popping up in different countries all over the world in the last few months. Most notably in China, of course, but also in India, France and Italy, where Google executives are in fact facing the possibility of jail time. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/... and http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5h-40ArK-e....
The role of Internet middlemen in enforcing copyright was a key legal issue in the last decade. It appears that censorship will be the analogous issue for the next decade. We seem to have reached a relatively happy middle ground with copyright—middlemen have some responsibility, but a strong form of copyright protection has proved unenforceable, forcing many industries to innovate or die. We can hope that a similar thing will happen with censorship, with oppressive governments either collapsing or being forced to allow free speech.
You can support laws such as these without being 'against freedom of speech'. After all, the very first article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood." Both this and article 19 (freedom of opinion and expression) must be supported, and when they are in conflict, a balance must be found.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_...
Unless you give this zero weight and think every reasonable person should do otherwise, then I do not think you have any excuse for saying that approving of hate-crime laws means being "against freedom of speech".
(Unless by "you are against freedom of speech" you mean "you think that there might be other considerations that sometimes justify limiting freedom of speech". In which case every reasonable person is "against" just about everything.)
There is no hate-crime legislation making it extra-bad to kill geeks because there aren't a bunch of malefactors out there killing geeks. It's arguable that hate-crime laws should be written in a more general way, instead of calling out particular discriminated-against groups, but if you'd accept that then congratulations, you're "against freedom of speech" in your own terms.
I too disagree with this censorship, but man, subjecting yourself to torture is not the answer!
For every link on ED, roll over it and take a look at its URL at the bottom of your browser. This'll keep you from being trolled into the offended page. Also, the contrast between URL and hyperlink text is one of ED's sources of irony.
For example, hyperlink text that says "actual news" might lead to ED's "serious business" page.
Warning: extremely racist.
If you search for Aboriginal Encyclopedia on google.com.au it shows up down the bottom.
"It portrays indigenous Australians in the most unsavoury light possible, and you wouldn't want a child stumbling across it," he told ABC Radio.
I'm getting really sick of people playing the "won't somebody think of the children" card.
2. karzeem, in another comment, says that the site is within the bounds of free speech. Sincere question from a non-Australian: does Australia have constitutional or otherwise legally protected free speech? In other words, is free speech a strong legal argument in Australia?
No. Australians have no direct freedoms at all. What rights they have are "implied" indirectly from other things such as that the federal government shall not restrict trade between the states (it's hard to trade if you can't talk ...). People talk from time to time about strengthening individual rights, but most Aussies couldn't care less and due to mandatory voting those that don't care will vote down just about any constitutional amendment making it extremely difficult for such reform to ever happen.
From Wikipedia: "While not a treaty itself, the Declaration was explicitly adopted for the purpose of defining the meaning of the words "fundamental freedoms" and "human rights" appearing in the United Nations Charter, which is binding on all member states. For this reason, the Universal Declaration is a fundamental constitutive document of the United Nations."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_...
If you go here: http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=aboriginal+encyc...
You will see no such warning. (At least I didn't)
Predicting what links will show up for who is hard, especially now that personalized results are used.
http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=17460
It actually has very little information...
After edit: Google also removes on its own initiative spam links from its search results. No one seems to complain about this except the spammers. I think that is great customer service, except that Google recently needs to do more of that. That too is not censorship. It is simply Google deciding what its business model is for delivering search results. You have the right to operate a website. Google also has the right to operate a website. Google decides whether or not to comply with applicable local law if there is some legal issue raised by its serving up search results in a particular place. If Google really doesn't like local law, it can use its bully pulpit to advocate a different law, or hire lawyers or lobbyists to change the law.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Encyclopedia+Dramatica
Currently, lots of good stuff shows up on a search for "Aborigines and encyclopedia,"
http://www.google.com/search?q=Aborigines+and+encyclopedia
so no harm, no foul.
Are you writing that from Australia? To the contrary, I find that I can search with any country's version of Google, including non-English versions, from here in the United States.
Could Australian participants confirm or deny the quoted statement? I thought other comments posted to this thread earlier already stated that Australians can search Google from any of Google's national sites.
Google redirects me to www.google.com.au
There's a link on the page to go to www.google.com
If I want to type something like www.google.co.nz into the browser I can search NZ fine. But getting to www.google.com is a two step process.
EDIT: Note, I am 100% against censorship.
But since it's not Chinese-style you can talk about the DMCA all you want -- the only things that disappear from search results are specific URLs which are claimed to violate the law itself, removed not after a wide-ranging government demand but after a narrowly-targeted civil-law complaint (and there's a counter-filing system which allows maintainers of those URLs to respond and have due process -- I doubt very much that China allows such challenges to its censorship).