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Google has quietly disableda feature that notified users of its search service in China when a keyword had been censored by the Chinese governments internet controls, according to censorship monitoring blogGreatFire.org. The blog reports that the change was made sometime between December 5 and December 8, 2012, with no official statement from Google to announce or explain its removal.

According to GreatFire.org Google has also deleted a help article which explained how to use the feature which it says indicates that Google is self-censoring in this instance, rather than being blocked by the government (which has happened in the past). Since the removal of the help article could only be done willingly by Google, the only explanation we see is that Google struck a deal with the Chinese government, giving in to considerable pressure to self-censor, it writes.

The blog argues that the move indicates a new development in the relationship between the Chinese government and Google since Google previously and successfully fought government attempts to censor its censorship notification feature, not to mention implementing the feature in the first place. Speculating on what might have caused Mountain Views change of heart, GreatFire.org writes:

How did the Chinese government force such a candid company to do its bidding? Perhaps thecomplete blocking of Google Searchon Nov 9 was part of it. Theblock was liftedafter less than 24 hours making the move look very peculiar. At the time we speculated that perhaps it was a test of a block-all-of-Google button, but this new theory of it being part of pressuring Google looks at least as likely. It may have been an instance of the government showing off its power to Google and using it as a leverage in their negotiations.

Also in November, thethrottling and partial blockingof Googles Mail service was stepped up considerably. In the end, Google may have decided that providing a restricted version of Google Search and a slow but usable Gmail to Chinese users is much better than being completely cut off.

Weve reached out to Google for confirmation that it has removed its censorship notification feature for users in China, and if it has self-censored in this instance to ask for its reasons for doing so. Well update this article with any response.Update:Google has now confirmed to TechCrunch that it has removed the notification feature.The company said it did not have a statement at this time.

Sources close to the matter suggest Google pulled the feature because it was making it more difficult for users to access its search services. The feature was originally conceived to counteract Chinese government internet controls which were reportedly blocking access to Google search for 90 seconds if a user attempted to search for a banned word.

By preemptively flagging banned words the hope was the notification feature gave users a chance to search for an alternative terms and thereby avoid being locked out of Google altogether. However, since the notification feature was implemented, access to Googles search engine in China has been blocked more often than usual presumably because the Chinese government was unhappy about the features existence meaning even fewer users were able to use Google search. Ergo: not the kind of outcome Google was hoping for.

Googles keyword censorship notification feature displayed the following message when a search result would be blocked by the Chinese government:

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Google Quietly Removes Censorship Warning Feature For Search Users In China (Updated)

The conventional wisdom in many circles is that Twitters biggest challenge lies in figuring out how to monetize its growing user base. And perhaps for the companys venture-capitalist backers or other startup founders, that is the most important question it has to answer but it is far from the only one. Recent events involving the French and German governments, and even the British legal system, have highlighted another crucial issue the network will have to struggle with, one that is arguably just as important to its future: namely, can it grow internationally and still maintain its self-professed status as the free-speech wing of the free-speech party?

As my GigaOM colleague Bobbie Johnson pointed out in a recent post, the French government has been making some strong and controversial statements about what it wants the company to do after an outbreak of homophobic, racist and anti-Semitic comments erupted on Twitter. The minister for womens rights, Najat Belkacem-Vallaud, wrote in a newspaper opinion piece that the government believes the service must respect the values of the Republic and take action to stop or censor hate speech. She said French authorities will be discussing how to do this with Twitter, and added (translation by Google):

Even before the work is started, it should already be possible to act to remove tweets that are clearly illegal and, at the very least, make access impossible, so that the damage already done [to homosexuals, etc.] do not persist or do not cause additional problems with young people attracted by the publicity given to this unfortunate story.

Since French laws make hate speech illegal (as similar laws do in a number of other countries, including Canada), the minister is really just asking Twitter to do the same thing the German government did: that is, to censor speech that contravenes the laws of the country. In the case of Germany, it was tweets by a neo-Nazi group, since expressing Nazi ideologies is illegal there. Twitter explained at the time that it had no choice but to obey the laws of the countries it does business in, but that it would try to limit the impact on free speech by only blocking access to those tweets for residents of Germany as permitted by the regional-censorship tools it announced about a year ago.

Although they havent gone as far as France or Germany, officials in Britain have also broached the idea of trying to restrict Twitter speech and for what they say are similarly virtuous purposes: after the riots in London last year, the government argued that much of the violence was driven by social media, including Facebook, Twitter and Blackberry instant messaging. The authorities held discussions with most of the major players about how (or whether) they should regulate such conduct, but in the end no action was taken. Twitter has also been involved in some of that countrys infamous super-injunction cases, where even the mention of an injunction is considered illegal.

In some ways, the German example was the most clear-cut case Twitter could possibly have wanted: it referred to specific speech expressing Nazi ideology that is illegal, and is relatively easy to nail down. But this ability opens a vast can of worms for a company whose CEO and general counsel have both repeatedly referred to it as the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.

In Turkey, for example, its illegal to say or do anything that is seen as insulting to Turkishness a law that the government has used to block YouTube videos, among other things. What if Turkey was to ask Twitter to block or ban tweets or accounts that engaged in anti-Turkish behavior? A similar kind of question came up during the recent hostilities between Israel and the terrorist group Hamas, when both sides used Twitter to hurl threats at each other. What if Israel asked Twitter to ban or block Hamas accounts or tweets sympathetic to this illegal organization? What if Egypt had asked for censorship during the Arab Spring?

The racist and homophobic tweets targeted by the French government are an even slipperier slope: even if hate speech is against the law, what 140-character messages would fall into that category? Would simply using a hashtag like #SiMonFilsEstGay (If my son was gay) or #UnBonJuif (A good Jew) qualify? If Twitter was supposed to be removing or blocking access to specific tweets, how would it determine which were genuinely hate speech? Would it have a list of banned words, or run some kind of sentiment algorithm filter on the entire stream?

In a very real sense, what the French government seems to want Twitter to do or wants to help it do is virtually impossible. Twitter sees almost half a billion tweets every day, and has difficulty even providing a search function that works over a longer period than about a week. How could it (or anyone else) manage to filter through those millions of tweets to remove or block access to ones that expressed specific thoughts or opinions? And even if it could, would that be the right thing to do? Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian makes a persuasive argument that it would not, although others have argued that France should renounce the free-speech fetish of the U.S.

As it becomes an increasingly global media entity, however and one that controls its own platform, unlike the declining media giants of the past this is an issue Twitter is going to have to confront head on. And how it handles these kinds of censorship demands will say a lot about how much trust we can have in this digital free-speech machine.

Read more:
Twitter’s challenge for 2013: Resisting state demands for censorship

Google appears to be backtracking on its once unshakeable anti-censorship stance, after removing a feature from its Chinese site designed to help users avoid getting cut off from the internet.

The feature -- which flagged up a warning message whenever a user began typing a censored word, then redirected them to a help page that explained how to avoid being cut off from the web -- appears to have been disabled some time between 5 and 8 December 2012, reports GreatFire.org.

The anti-censorship feature only came into being in June 2012, at which time it was almost immediately blocked by China. Google retaliated by embedding the function into the html of its start page, thus rendering it permanent, bar a total Google block. And on 9 November 2012, that's just what the Chinese authorities did. The site was blocked for around 24 hours and censorship of Gmail was stepped up considerably thereafter.

"It may have been an instance of the government showing off its power to Google and using it as a leverage in their negotiations," speculates GreatFire.org. "In the end, Google may have decided that providing a restricted version of Google Search and a slow but usable Gmail to Chinese users is much better than being completely cut off."

Google launched Google.cn back in 2006 and has been exchanging threats with the Chinese authorities ever since. The search engine attempted to tread a fine line between keeping the authorities and its users happy, but by 2010 tensions had escalated exponentially. Google announced it would no longer censor its search results in China, but instead redirect traffic to its uncensored Hong Kong site, following a cyber attack that it claimed originated in China.

At the time, Sergey Brin commented that Google would continue in its aim to preserve "the principles of the openness and freedom of information on the internet". Meanwhile, however, China's Minister of Industry and Information Technology Li Yizhong asserted that Google should step in line with the law or "pay the consequences".

"What needs to be shut down will be shut down, what needs to be blocked will be blocked," she said at the time.

Google might appear to be selectively abiding by the web's freedom of information motto, but it has done more than some in challenging China's stranglehold on internet freedoms.

The actions do, however, echo Brin's despondence with the situation as relayed to the Guardian in April 2012. He said that somewhere between the rampant censorship and ongoing global cyberwars, he had been proven wrong in his belief that no country could restrict the internet for too long. "I thought there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle, but now it seems in certain areas the genie has been put back in the bottle," he said.

It may just be that Google has also come to the realisation that with its meagre five percent marketshare in China -- compared to competitor Baidu's 74 percent -- it will not be able to achieve much when it comes to making a dent in the country's censorship policies, nor the public's access to information. You have to be in the game to win it, so perhaps the search giant is opting to shelve its futile cat and mouse game with China for a while, and play ball instead.

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Google backtracks on Chinese anti-censorship feature

Culture Clash: Douglas Murray on Censorship in Islam

By: DouglasMurrayVideos

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Culture Clash: Douglas Murray on Censorship in Islam - Video

Douglas Murray on Censorship and Blasphemy Laws

By: DouglasMurrayVideos

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Douglas Murray on Censorship and Blasphemy Laws - Video