Reporters Without Borders (RSF for its French name) issued today the results of an analysis it conducted on search engines in China. Based on this analysis, RSF determined that Yahoo! is guilty of the highest degree of censorship in that country, surpassing even domestic government-sanctioned search engine Baidu.com.
RSF conducted searches on Google.com, Google.cn, MSN.cn, Yahoo.cn and Baidu.cn using “subversive” keywords to measure how many times “authorized” versus “unauthorized” sites came up. Not only did Yahoo.cn deliver the most pro-government results and the least unauthorized results, searchers using “subversive” keywords were temporarily blocked from conducting any further searches, a technical lock-out practiced by none of the other search engines aside from Baidu.com.
The press freedom organisation is particularly shocked by the scale of censorship on yahoo.cn. first because the search results on “subversive” key words are 97% pro-Beijing. It is therefore censoring more than its Chinese competitor Baidu. Above all, the organisation was able to show that requests using certain terms, such as 6-4 (4 June, date of the Tiananmen Square massacre), or “Tibet independence”, temporarily blocked the search tool. If you type in one of these terms on the search tool, first you receive an error message. If you then go back to make a new request, even with a neutral key word, yahoo.cn refuses to respond. It takes one hour before the service can be used again. This method is not used by any other foreign search tools; only Baidu uses the same technique.
Google.com and Google.cn came out on top, delivering fewer authorized results and blocking fewer unauthorized results. Google’s seeming unwillingness to tote the hard line is one reason why the Chinese government periodically shuts down Google.com’s operations within China. The latest Google crack-down occurred earlier this month, but the site seems to be back up now.
Cynthia Brumfield at 9:41 PM|Comments(0)
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