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Google's self-censorship in China and Germany.

  
  

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ShadowSax
11:06 / 29.01.06
so beyond what is legal and illegal in a free society, are you saying that the information retrieved by google should be determined by taste?
 
 
Dead Megatron
11:22 / 29.01.06
If it's not meant to be taken seriously, Dead Megatron, why post it in a serious forum?

Because it's good to take a break every once in a while, lest things get to hard to swallow. Too much seriousness can ruin a person's soul. But I guess you already know that, dontch'ya?

And, if I were one of the Google people, I would do that because I believe in freedom of information more than I belive in capitalism.

Haus, you would make such a great Tought Police official in a hipotetical PC totalitarian society. I bet you even dream about it...
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
11:47 / 29.01.06
Dead Megatron, did you ever finish reading that thread on PC you contributed to a while back? If not, why not have another go?

child porn is illegal. the exchange and possession of child porn is illegal, regardless of the method of exchange and possession. for google or any corporation to participate in those activities would be illegal. being a nazi, at least in america, isnt illegal. nor is believing that the holocaust didnt happen.


That's right. And, although being a Nazi and believing that the Holocaust did not happen are also not illegal in Germany, neo-Nazi organisations and Holocaust denial are. As such, there is no difference at all between what Google US is doing with child pornography and what Google Germany is doing with Holocaust denial. Therefore, I'm not seeing what the "big difference" is.
 
 
Dead Megatron
12:15 / 29.01.06
Who said anything about any "big difference"? I'm just saying it's ok to relax and take a joke every now and then, even in the middle of a serious argument (comic relief, is what they call it) My "funny" post was meant to keep this thread to become yet another endless bickering between you an Shadowsax, but I see now I only manage to drag myself into it.

And, btw, you're preaching to the wrong person: I still belive every information should be accessable by all, even if you don't like the subject. It is risky, I know, but I'll take freedom over safety anytime. Talking about a subject and engaging in activities relating to such subject are two different animals, don't you agree? If I say, for instance, that a 13-old girl is "hot", but do not pursue her in any way, nor try to take naked pics of her or drag her into my bed, I think I should not be considered a monster and locked away. Or if I say "jews can be annoying" or that "it wasn't six million dead, it was four", I shoud not be labeled anti-semite and equally locked away. Do you agree?

[memo to Haus: I do not support pedophily or neo nazism in any way, I just don't give much of a fuck if other people do. As long as they're just talking about it, it's their freaking problem]
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
12:32 / 29.01.06
Who said anything about any "big difference"?

Shadowsax, here.

I'm not talking to you in that paragraph, Dead Megatron, not least because you have shown no interest in the topic or learning more about it, as it appears you have not about Political Correctness, as you have clearly not read the thread discussing it. Shadowsax, even if he is allergic to research, at least just about manages to stay something resembling on topic, except when he hits whinegasm. You appear to have no such ability. We are talking about Google's decision to limit its search functionality, not about you, and not about whether you should be able to call 13-year olds hot. If you want to talk about that, start a new thread, possibly in the Head Shop. Before you do that, however, please read the wiki on posting in the Revolution fora, because at the moment your lack of interest in doing anything with Barbelith but vomiting out whatever goldfish happen to be swimming through your head at any given moment onto it is creating the effect of threadrot.
 
 
Dead Megatron
12:49 / 29.01.06
I'm not talking to you in that paragrpah, Dead Megatron

ok, my bad
 
 
ShadowSax
19:24 / 29.01.06
well if neo-nazi orgs are illegal in germany and if denying the holocaust is illegal in germany, then there you go. no big deal. i wasnt aware of that. o liberator of truth, thank u. i <3 truth.

being a capitalist business doesnt allow one to break the law of a country.

so if you deny the holocaust in germany, you can actually be locked up?
 
 
Jack Vincennes
20:14 / 29.01.06
Yes, and David Irving was. Or rather, he was locked up in Austria where I believe the law is the same.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
20:35 / 29.01.06
OK... so, it's fine to keep what is not legal in a given country out of Google searches, and that is not part of a project to change that society, but only an example of a country working in accordance with local law and changing the service it offers. Therefore:

1) What is different, if anything, between Germany, which outlaws Holocaust denial, and China, which outlaws human rights and democracy movements?
1b) Is it that Germany's laws are put together as part of a constitution maintained by democratically-elected governments?
1c) Further, does this have implications when the same principles are applied to servicing an undemocratic state?
1d) How does all that tie in with the advancement of "freedom" in China, which was on the march earlier in this thread?
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
21:04 / 29.01.06
Dead Megatron, kindly refrain from insulting people in your posts, please.
 
 
Evil Scientist
11:08 / 30.01.06
1) What is different, if anything, between Germany, which outlaws Holocaust denial, and China, which outlaws human rights and democracy movements?

Perhaps it's that, if sufficient people in Germany desired it, then the laws banning Holocaust denial could be revoked. Whereas in China, even if the majority did want to legalise democracy movements and so forth, they have no way of creating that change without resorting to open rebellion/civil war.

1b) Is it that Germany's laws are put together as part of a constitution maintained by democratically-elected governments?

Yes. An ultra-liberal government which espoused similar views to Dead Megatron could attempt to get rid of the laws regarding denial. However, there are safeguards in place in democratic states designed to prevent governments pushing legislation through unresisted. Look at the current ongoing battle over ID cards in the UK as a good example of this.

1c) Further, does this have implications when the same principles are applied to servicing an undemocratic state?

Can you re-phrase this please Haus? I think I left home without my brain today, I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

1d) How does all that tie in with the advancement of "freedom" in China, which was on the march earlier in this thread?

Well, I suppose that if China had a greater supply of "freedonium", then a decision to limit access to various parts of the internet would be considered to have arisen as a choice of "the people" rather than as a result of decisions made by "the man". Of course, the Chinese government most likely argues that it is acting in the best interests of it's people, and that our criticisms are a biased product of our own (far-from-perfect) societies.
 
 
grant
16:46 / 30.01.06
the Chinese government most likely argues that it is acting in the best interests of it's people, and that our criticisms are a biased product of our own (far-from-perfect) societies.

Might be worth pointing out that this opinion would be shared by a few ordinary Chinese people, too. Chinese patriots. Not all billion of them feel oppressed all the time.
 
 
grant
20:58 / 13.02.06
More on the workarounds -- the tunnels under the Great Firewall of China.

Here's an International Herald Tribune story about the Google self-censorship. It starts with "Chinese Internet mavens" grumbling about how people will think they're using the "real" Google. But then it goes on to sketch out the ways in which the culture has been glorping around censors in a steady way, and is now challenging government censorship head on.

Microsoft alone hosts an estimated 3.3 million blogs in China. Add to that the 10 million or so other blogs hosted by other Internet service providers, and one gets a flavor for just how much of a censor's nightmare China has become.

What is more, not a single blog existed in the country a little more than three years ago, and thousands upon thousands are being born every day....

Editors, like Li Datong, of a recently closed Beijing newspaper supplement, Bing Dian, officially owned by the Communist Party Youth League, have begun to use the courts to challenge government efforts to silence them.

But I'm more interested in this BusinessWeek article on an informal network of Chinese expatriates dedicated to getting the truth to the People's Republic by providing services that act as uncensored web portals. It focuses on Bill Xia, a Falun Gong supporter who lives in North Carolina.

Xia is part of a small group of Chinese expatriates who are making a modest living helping Web surfers back home get the information their government would rather they not see. Chinese citizens hoping to read about the latest crackdown on, say, Falun Gong or the most recent peasant rebellion in the provinces can use technology provided by Xia's Dynamic Internet Technology Inc. to mask their travels to forbidden Web sites.

Voice of America (VOA) and human rights organizations also are paying DIT to help evade the censors and get their message out to the Chinese masses. Says Xiao Qiang, who teaches journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and runs the China Internet Project: "These tools have a critical impact because the people using them are journalists, writers, and opinion leaders."

... Every time something momentous happens in China -- and Beijing smothers news about it -- more people use his software, Xia says. In 2003, when the SARS epidemic peaked and Chinese authorities seemed to be withholding information, the number of DIT users spiked by 50%, he says -- and they doubled after reports surfaced in December that Guangdong police had shot protesting villagers.
 
 
grant
13:35 / 14.02.06
Weird: this list of the 50 most-linked-to blogs include several from China.
 
 
stuzzy
01:29 / 16.02.06
You can't censor the internet - even with Google's army of PhDs and sophisticated algorithms, "seditious" stuff will slip through any filter they build. For example, while searches for Tiananmen square will be censored up to wazoo (example image search here, no tanks in site, just pretty pagodas), searching for a misspelling of it such as Tienanmen will yield tanks galore

And it's not just typos that will trip up this filter - there is just too much content that is too varied on the internet. Sure, you can block big obvious things like Wikipedia or major blogs, but anything short of a true artificial intelligence prowling the internet and identifying what the Chinese find as unacceptable will end up failing, and right now even Google doesn't have that technology.

I'm not saying I like what they're doing, but it really might work out for the "greater good" after all (and not just because it lets another corporation enter the Chinese market).
 
 
grant
16:12 / 16.02.06
It might be worth considering that China doesn't need an artificial intelligence, since it has real ones inside human heads. Thousands of them, all employed by the Party....
 
 
grant
14:06 / 21.02.06
An interesting case for compare & contrast: Washington Post reports on Wikipedia in China.

Access has been blocked since last December.

"Wikipedia isn't a Web site for spreading reactionary speech or a pure political commentary site," Shi, 33, wrote a few days later. Yes, it contained entries on sensitive subjects such as Taiwan and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, but users made sure its articles were objective, he said, and blocking it would only make it harder for people in China to delete "harmful" content.

Shi was hopeful the government would agree. When the site was blocked in 2004, he had submitted a similar letter, and access had been quickly restored. Since then, the Chinese-language edition of Wikipedia had grown....


To many educated in China, these governing principles of Wikipedia -- objectivity in content, equality among users, the importance of consensus -- were relatively new concepts. Yuan said he consulted the work of philosopher John Rawls and economist Friedrich Hayek to better understand how a free community could organize itself and "produce order from chaos."

"We had heard of these ideas, but they really didn't have much to do with our lives," said Yuan, now a computer programmer. "In school, we were taught an official point of view, not a neutral point of view. And we didn't learn much about how to cooperate with people who had different opinions."

Pretty wild.

There's also interesting bits about how China uses the net differently from Americans:

Although Chinese write less e-mail than Americans, they embrace the Internet's other communication tools -- bulletin boards and chat rooms, instant-messaging groups and blogs, photo-sharing and social networking sites. A popular feature of the Chinese search engine Baidu lets users chat with others who have entered the same keywords.
 
  

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