Report: Google will ‘shift toward censorship’ to appease China

by WorldTribune Staff, October 10, 2018

Google is likely to willfully comply with censorship demands to gain a foothold in countries with authoritarian governments, a leaked document says.

“The Good Censor” document concludes that Google “will have to continue its move towards censorship if it wishes to appease national governments and continue its global expansion. It also cites appeasing advertisers as a justification for censorship,” according to Breitbart News, which exclusively obtained the leaked document from within Google.

A top example of Google’s apparent willingness to comply with a foreign government’s censorship regime is its development of the “Dragonfly” search engine for communist China. The search engine will contain a list of blacklisted search terms, and will link searches to Chinese users’ personal phone numbers.

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence has called on Google to scrap the development of Dragonfly.

Related: ‘There is a project Dragonfly,’ Google exec admits during tense Senate hearing, September 28, 2018

“The Good Censor” reveals that government requests for Google to censor content “have nearly tripled since 2016, although it does not say that Google shouldn’t cooperate,” Breitbart News reported.

The document shows that Google subsidiary YouTube is the main target with just over 50 percent of censorship requests, compared to 19.8 percent for Google search.

The document admits that tech platforms including Google, Facebook and Twitter underwent a “shift towards censorship” over the past few years.

Responding to the leak, an official Google source said the document should be considered internal research, and not an official company position, Breitbart News noted.

View “The Good Censor” in full here


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