Censorship on Google: A Troubling Way to Keep Information Out of the Public Eye

The Internet provides more content than any previous medium has, and search engines are essential to sort through the content to find what the user wants. Unfortunately, by helping filter the sites, they limit our awareness, and we end up finding only what the search engine deems relevant to our queries. This capacity can be abused to limit access to certain information, and prevent it from reaching the public eye, as Yahoo and Google have done.

While Fox News may well have a political ax to grind in exposing Matthew Lee's anti-UN articles, possibly hoping to discredit the UN, the idea of his articles not appearing on Google News because of their tilt is troubling. While it may seem as though they were only suppressed on one site, Google News is supposed to be a repository for the day's news online, and the story's absence is especially noticeable given his stories' previous popularity. Google's citing his site as a "one-man" operation despite the volunteers taht work for it seems to be at best a faulty application of standards, and at worst, an impromptu justification for delisting him.

There is also the case of Guo Quan, a dissident Chinese blogger whose blog was removed from Google and Yahoo's search results in China. In doing so, Yahoo and Google prevent people from even gaining awareness of these issues, as people searching about the Communist Party would not be able to see his work. The reasons given are even less justified than those in Lee's case, since Google justifies this by acting under Chinese law and for the interest of doing business in China, which suggests that Google willingly upholds China's censorship policy merely to retain access to China.

This type of censorship is especially troubling, as while under more traditional forms of censorship, people might be able to notice what the government is not talking about, removing it from the search engines severely hinders people from even gaining awareness that the issues are out there, much less finding them by searching. Even if people are still able to access those websites, often by way of a special browser window that enables them to search and surf without restrictions, those people will be a minority, usually only those who are already aware of the degree of censorship or what is being censored, thus limiting the spread of the information and allowing the misconceptions to continue being seen as legitimate and true. The Internet should be more than a large repository of information, but should also be accessible, and by helping keep news that they or those they have connections with out of browsers' sight, Google and Yahoo are detracting from the Internet's purpose as the "information superhighway."