For Westerners who enjoy living in democracies, it’s easy to answer the question of whether or not censorship is desirable. It is not. But in China, which doesn’t respect free speech, that’s not an especially useful question. A more uncomfortable question would be: Just how different is China’s censorship from ours?
New data released by Google as part of its Transparency Report shows that government agencies in many Western democracies have asked the company to remove political content that users had posted to its services. “It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect – Western democracies not typically associated with censorship,” wrote Google policy analyst Dorothy Chou in a blog post yesterday.
In the second half of last year, for example, US agencies asked Google to remove 6,192 individual pieces of content from its search results, blog posts, or archives of online videos – a 718 percent increase from the first half of the year. During the same time period, US law enforcement agencies lodged 187 take-down requests, including one related to a blog post that “allegedly defamed a law enforcement official in a personal capacity.”
Google received numerous similar requests from Spain, Italy, Australia, Germany, Poland, Canada, and others. It did not comply with most of them, but the company did act in response to 42 percent of removal requests from the US in the second half of 2011. Full story...
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New data released by Google as part of its Transparency Report shows that government agencies in many Western democracies have asked the company to remove political content that users had posted to its services. “It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect – Western democracies not typically associated with censorship,” wrote Google policy analyst Dorothy Chou in a blog post yesterday.
In the second half of last year, for example, US agencies asked Google to remove 6,192 individual pieces of content from its search results, blog posts, or archives of online videos – a 718 percent increase from the first half of the year. During the same time period, US law enforcement agencies lodged 187 take-down requests, including one related to a blog post that “allegedly defamed a law enforcement official in a personal capacity.”
Google received numerous similar requests from Spain, Italy, Australia, Germany, Poland, Canada, and others. It did not comply with most of them, but the company did act in response to 42 percent of removal requests from the US in the second half of 2011. Full story...
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