Thursday, January 05, 2006

Note: Internet Censorship...

I always, in my immense naivete, thought I would not have to seriously worry about such a thing, in the so-called land of the free. But many of the claims made in the article below, are things that I have noticed myself also. Just something to look out for, and maybe act against.
Internet Censorship: The Warning Signs were not hidden

Google is systematically failing to list and link to articles that contain explosive information about the Bush administration, the war in Iraq, Al Qaeda, and U.S. political scandals. But Google is not alone in working closely to stifle Internet discourse. America On Line, Microsoft, Yahoo and others are slowly turning the Internet into an information superhighway dominated by barricades, toll booths, off-ramps that lead to dead ends, choke points, and security checks.
(Read More...)

4 comments:

Denis said...

This is one thing that has had me worried for a while. All the major search engines are American. Can you name a non American search engine? I know of a chineseone that was bought a few months ago. The only two French search engines I know of are dir.com and voila.fr, not that good but alternatives. I wonder if there is any African based search engine, with it's own data I mean.

Google doesn't seem to be that much of a censor: http://www.google.com/search?q=war+in+Iraq
the results are diverse, maybe I'm missed it. What's is specifically censored? Yahoo! even has a link (#3) to Aljazeera : http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=war+in+iraq

TheMalau said...

See although the article says it wasn't subtle, it actually is. They mainly talk about really radical sites, that can only be found in very - more than usually - specific searches. try to type in "TV channels Iraq", and see if Al Manar's website appears. It didn't for me.

Denis said...

hmm I'm getting more skeptical about this. Al Manar's website is in Arabic so it seems normal to me that it doesn't show up in the top results for "TV channels Iraq" (they do have an English section however). Is http://www.almanar.com.lb/ its website? .lb is Lebanon isn't it?

Anyway, major American search engines companies are collaborating with "censoring" governments to prevent their citizens from accessing some stuff. So what doesn't happen here happens somewhere.

On another note, about non American Search engines: French President Chirac mentioned a European based search engine Quaéro, that should be in the works pretty soon. Hopefully it won't take as much time to get done as the Internation French Information channel... which after many years of talk isn't their yet at all.

Beaver said...

Here comes the hippie!

Just wanted to thank you for that very informative comment on 007's blog. I gave you a reply by the way.

I'll keep reading... ;)

Cheers!

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