That's Rich: China Accuses Google Of Censorship
from the look-inward... dept
China, of course, is famous for massive censorship of the internet. Google, on the other hand, is well known for fighting censorship in many cases. Even in China, where it was required to block some searches, Google tried to take as permissive an approach as possible, even letting users know when a site was being blocked (yes, this was quite controversial, but the company did more than many other search engines). So, it does seem a bit surprising to see a headline claiming that China is accusing Google of censorship. Isn't that backwards?It isn't "China" so much as it's the Chinese Communist Party's main newspaper (so, basically, the paper of record from the government) claiming that Google is not finding a report it put out suggesting that Google's book searching project might violate Chinese authors' copyrights. Of course, that claim is a bit amusing as well, given China's general attitude towards copyright over the last couple of decades... but that's another story.
Google claims that it did no censorship at all, and that there was an automated block put on the site via its StopBadware service, which makes sense. Google has long used StopBadware to try to protect users from malware sites, and the service does sometimes make errors. While it seems unlikely that Google would purposely block the report, that doesn't make it any less strange for a Chinese government publication to accuse Google of censorship. Given the government's happy embrace of censorship, how does it have any sort of moral claim here?
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Filed Under: book scanning, censorship, china, stopbadware
Companies: google
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quote on: Prominent Chinese Site Flagged for Badware
The interesting piece from this post:
"As reported, the Google statement makes a small mistake in indicating that StopBadware.org provided the software for this automated system. In fact, Google’s Safe Browsing team developed the system themselves. For more information, see the relevant section of our FAQ."
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Moral claim?
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Turnabout
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Obviously you are a big Google fan and always take their claims as facts with no need to check (still under the spell of their "do no evil" slogan I guess), but the credibility of your blog (and your journalism skills) won't benefit from this ineptitude.
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Re:
Please explain what we did not understand. I note you failed to do so.
Obviously you are a big Google fan and always take their claims as facts with no need to check
Um, actually we have gone against Google on many things, including the Google book search settlement and many, many other things its done.
Ooops. Looks like you didn't check your facts, did you?
but the credibility of your blog (and your journalism skills) won't benefit from this ineptitude.
I'm not a journalist. My credibility isn't hurt in the slightest. You got the basic facts wrong and didn't fact check. If my credibility is hurt, yours is hurt even more. No wonder you post anonymously.
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Re: Re:
which is wrong since they claim it was blocked, but obviously the idea that Google couldn't find it seems sillier so that's your "story".
You describe the Google position as "Google claims .., which makes sense."
No attempt to analyze you just decide Google is correct.
Oooops. Looks like you didn't read your source or check your facts, did you ?
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~~~ move along people nothing new here.
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Here's a list of allowed things you can accuse us of:
- Running lots of web applications that never seem to get out of Beta.
- Installing silly slides and firemen poles in our offices.
- Rolling over whenever some bank has a judge tell us to block some user account thru no fault of said user.
Here are the things you don't get to accuse us of:
- Censorship
- Exiling the leader of the tibetan religion/state and placing your own puppet in his place
- Trying to run people over with tanks
- Communism
- Murdering women that have more than one child
- Accusing Richard Gere of murder.
- An horrible fashion sense.
Sincerely,
The guys at Google corp.
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Re: Re: Re:
Sorry, you misread what I wrote. By "not finding" I meant that when people do a search they weren't able to get to it. That's accurate.
No attempt to analyze you just decide Google is correct.
Actually, I did attempt to analyze it, and found Google's position credible, given how Google acts on these issues elsewhere. Do you have any proof to the contrary?
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