3 February 2006 @ 9:33AM >> Since the beginning of the year, both Microsoft and Google have seen self-inflicted public relations disasters stem from their decisions to censor political content deemed inconvenient by the Chinese government. Now, Microsoft has decided to make own employees over its abrupt censoring of a Chinese blogger, Microsoft Corp. has formulated a new policy to deal with requests from a government that alleges that posted material violates its laws.

The measures were detailed by Microsoft’s top lawyer, Brad Smith, at the Government Leaders Forum in Lisbon today.

Smith said Microsoft will remove blogs only when given proper legal notice. And even then, it will block access to that material only within the country where it is deemed unlawful. The site will still be viewable from outside the country, he said.

[...]

“Obviously, what we are trying to do with the kinds of principles we articulated today is ... obey the law in the countries in which we do business but also pay appropriate respect to the needs of our users, both those who put information up on a blog and those who want to read that information around the world,” Smith said.

30 January 2006 @ 5:37PM >> Google recently modified their official statement on censorship, SayAnything reports. In the wake of Google’s deal to censor content on behalf of the communist Chinese government, the self-proclaimed Don’t Be Evil company is no longer able to stand behind this statement:

Google does not censor results for any search term. The order and content of our results are completely automated; we do not manipulate our search results by hand. We believe strongly in allowing the democracy of the web to determine the inclusion and ranking of sites in our search results.

And with a swift deletion and a quick save, Google revises its principles.

28 January 2006 @ 11:25AM >> Google has been taking a lot of flak, rightfully so, for censoring search results to satisfy the Chinese communist dictatorship.

The search engine is placing notices on each page notifying users that items have been censored at the request of the Chinese government, so it isn’t quite as bad as Microsoft’s actions to placate the Chinese, which include taking down entire websites without notice, rendering them inaccessible to the entire world. Google’s censorship applies only to the version of the search engine aimed at the Chinese market. Still, for a company whose motto is “Don’t Be Evil,” the action is at best hypocritical, and it shows the slogan to be nothing more than empty P.R. sermonizing.

The simplest illustration of the moral compromise made by the Don’t Be Evil company comes from Jonah Goldberg, who recommends searching for “Tiananmen” on Chinese Google and comparing that to the results from the uncensored Google. That’s right, the Tiananmen Square Massacre, an inconvenient historical fact for the repressive Chinese regime, has gone down the memory hole thanks to the good folks at Google.

I’ve refined the search a bit for an even starker contrast. Here’s what comes up in the standard Google image search for “Tiananmen Square Massacre”, and here’s the scrubbed version on Chinese Google.

What makes Google’s actions even more hypocritical is that, just a week before this Google flap erupted, the company was hailed by privacy advocates for refusing to turn over to the U.S. Justice Department aggregate data on searches for child pornography. What a brave stand!

So Google has the backbone to rebuff to the U.S. government’s attempts to fight child porn, but the Don’t Be Evil company is willing to help China continue to repress its people by erasing moments from history like the Tiananmen Square massacre.

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Update: Google’s blocks on certain words can apparently be avoided by a little creative misspelling.

3 January 2006 @ 1:48PM >> Is Microsoft helping the Chinese communists suppress speech that they don’t like? It sure sounds that way.

Reporter Rebecca MacKinnon tells the story of Zhao Jing who blogs under the handle “Michael Anti.” MacKinnon notes that “Anti is one of China’s edgiest journalistic bloggers, often pushing at the boundaries of what is acceptible.” His blog, hosted on Microsoft’s MSN Spaces website, was recently shut down, apparently by Microsoft. So MacKinnon conducted her own tests, and discovered that MSN Spaces is systematically censoring words and removing blogs thought to be threatening to the Chinese regime:

On December 16th I created a blog and attempted to make various posts with politically sensitive words. When I attempted to post entries with titles like “Tibet Independence” or “Falun Gong” (a banned religious group), I got an error message saying: “This item includes forbidden language. Please delete forbidden language from this item.”

However I was successful in posting blog entries with non-controversial titles, but with politically sensitive words in the text body. For instance, a blog post titled “I love you” had “Tibet independence” in the text body, and a post titled “I am happy” had “Falun Gong” in the body [...]

This was on Friday December 16th. By Monday the 19th, the whole blog had been taken down [...] with an error message: “This space is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.”

Now, It is VERY important to note that the inaccessible blog was moved or removed at the server level and that the blog remains inaccessible from the United States as well as from China. This means that the action was taken NOT by Chinese authorities responsible for filtering and censoring the internet for Chinese viewers, but by MSN staff at the level of the MSN servers.