Google planning to launch a censored search engine in China is irresponsible
There was a Chinese activist called Liu Xiaobo, who died in 2017. A writer, professor, human rights activist, Nobel Peace Prize winner and dissident, Xiaobo had been an enemy of the Communist regime in China since taking part in the student protests in 1989 — protests that led to the bloody Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Xiaobo’s subversion of authority, his political activism and his ideology meant incarceration — lots of it. When he was awarded the Nobel in 2010, he was, of course, not allowed to receive it. China received international criticism for this. But internally? Who knows what the state-controlled media chooses to not report. After his death in 2017 — he died of multiple organ failure — the highly censored Chinese internet did not leave room for much of his memories.
His name, his wife’s name, his iconic statements, his photos, news of the Nobel Peace Prize, his empty chair at the same event — are all things you can’t talk about on Weibo, China’s largest social media platform, and WeChat, China’s most popular instant messaging app.
When you search for Liu’s name, or his wife’s name on the Chinese internet, all you get to see are bits and pieces of news and heavily critical editorials on how Liu’s victimhood was misused by the West to demonise the Communist government.
Search engines — one of the most important things in the world in this day and age — thus, serve no purpose in China.
Most popular internet-based applications and websites are banned in China. Between blocked websites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc., to blocked search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo, to blocked instant messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, LINE, KaKao Talk and Signal, there is little scope for the Chinese citizens to access free-flowing information; and there are massive losses for these companies who have not been able to tap into the most populous country in the world.
Google, it seems, has had enough of this and has decided to compromise; in favour of profit, of course. After all, China, according to Motherboard writer Daniel Oberhaus, is a goldmine for internet companies, with twice as many people online as America.
According to reports, Google is planning to launch a censored version of its search engine for China that will block websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest.
The project — code-named Dragonfly — has been underway since the spring of 2017, and according to leaked internal documents accessed by Intercept, has accelerated following a December 2017 meeting between Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai and a top Chinese government official.
The report adds that Google is likely to roll out this censored search engine through a Chinese android app in the next six months, and this search engine would block all things unwanted by the Chinese government: Services already outlawed in China, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Wikipedia, sensitive news such as the Tiananmen Square massacre and Liu Xiaobo, and international media outlets like the BBC and the New York Times.
That Google would not care for civic duties — in this instance not just censoring information and knowledge, but also censoring ideological differences and news of human rights violations — is not hard to imagine. What is surprising, however, is that Google, back in 2010, withdrew its services from China after it discovered a cyberattack from within the country that targeted it and dozens of other companies. And while investigating the attack, Google found that the Gmail accounts of a number of Chinese human-rights activists had been hacked.
Google’s foray into the Chinese market once more, this time complying with their Orwellian demands, sets a bad example for other internet companies. What is to stop Facebook and Twitter to approach the Chinese government again, and agreeing to send an error message every time one tries to tweet about, or write a post about an activist like Liu Xiaobo?
Tech and internet companies have a responsibility that they can happily shrug off as a mild ethical conundrum. And a move like this only bares them to the world.