Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[TJ Parker]

censorship - its not just for china anymore ...

interesting: following up on the discussion yesterday on goog. apparently goog images is now censoring photos on anything related to abu ghraib. (but just goog: not yahoo, alta vista, dogpile, etc ...)

from a link from a discussion on metafilter:
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Wed Oct 06, 2004 1:37 pm Post subject: Google Images Pulls Abu Ghraib Photos Reply with quote
Google Images http://images.google.com/ has recently removed images from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Google is the gold standard of search engines, and Google Image Search is the gold standard of image search engines. Searches for Abu Ghraib were usually very fruitful, bringing up the same sickening poses over and over. That is until the last week. Searches for Abu Ghraib now bring up only pictures of the prison *from the outside* and a few photos of the region.

Searches for Lynndie England and Charles Graner bring up next to nothing. Actually in the case of Miss England, they bring up literally nothing!

Google Images are collected by a "bot" that crawls throughout the web. This "bot" is essentially a computer program that associates text and images through amazingly complex software. I am fairly certain that images would have to be censored by hand or the "bot" purposefully "told" to ignore such sites. I am currently looking into the technology that makes Google tick, but it is a bit murky.

In any event the images are missing and no one has the slightest idea why.

In case you would like to try for yourself:


http://images.google.com/images?q=lynndie+england&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=abu+ghraib&btnG=Search

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&q=charles+graner&btnG=Search


More than a little odd considering the fact that all of the above links would provide images of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Yes, I realize the pictures can be found on Google and many other websites, but that is not my point. The "go to" website for image searches has apparently decided to axe the images. They may claim bandwidth issues, but they sure do have a lot of porn available. We all know how popular porn is. They may claim to have removed pictures for legal issues, but still have an embarrassing amount of illegal content available.

Google has helped governments filter web results, as has Yahoo! Germany and France received help from Google to filter search results. Yahoo! assisted China in preventing the Chinese people from having free access to information.

Filtering technology exists. It is my opinion that this is being used in the USA and I'm damn mad!