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What's Google censoring in China?

Many Web sites censored from Google's Chinese results touch on topics known to be unpopular with the Communist Party: the Tiananmen protest and massacre, political criticism in general, Tibet, Taiwan and Falun Gong (a growing movement that combines traditional Chinese breathing exercises with meditation and that's been denounced by the Chinese government as a cult). But others are more puzzling, such as jokes and alcohol.

Google.cn does not list Bacardi.com, a maker of rum and other spirits. Yet Bacardi.com is visible through searches on Yahoo's China site and Microsoft's beta Chinese search.

Similarly, Lesbian.com is permitted by Yahoo and Microsoft, but not Google. Neworder.box.sk, a computer security site, and the matchmaking site Date.com are blackballed only by Google.

"Our focus tends to be more North America and Europe, but we are a bit concerned because we have been expanding into other regions, and China does represent a large potential market for us," said Michael Ellis, privacy and security manager for Date.com.

Scaling the Chinese firewall
To test the effectiveness of search censorship in China, News.com wrote a computer program to check 4,600 Internet host names compiled by the Open Net Initiative for use in earlier tests of Chinese filtering. Web sites that were indexed by Google.com and MSN.com but not their Chinese counterparts were identified. Only a subset was tested against Yahoo because its Chinese Web site was frequently nonresponsive, and the program tested only host names, not individual Web pages.

The results showed that Google blocked the most sites, filtering out about 13 per cent of the host names tested compared with MSN's 10 per cent. But while both MSN and Google deleted pornography and political sites from search listings, Google also singled out more humour sites and more sites related to homosexuality -- and it was the only search engine to block information related to alcohol, dating and marijuana.

Danene Sorace, director of the Network for Family Life Education at Rutgers University, says she's not pleased that the university's Sex, etc. site is being filtered out by Google.cn. "The challenge, of course, is that sexual health information often gets mixed up in pornography," Sorace said. "What we are about is about sexual health, and that often gets lost when you apply these kinds of filtering programs."

Google.cn's censorship was not just overinclusive. Like the other search engines, it frequently was underinclusive as well. The pro-marijuana site HighTimes.com is blocked, but its alternate domain name of 420.com was not (420 is a slang term associated with marijuana use). Bacardi.com was missing, but the company's French, German, Canadian and Italian country-code sites were still available. While Penthouse.com and Playboy.com were invisible, searching on the magazines' titles offered an Amazon.com subscription link.

Mickey Spiegel, senior researcher in the Asia division of Human Rights Watch (blocked by Google and Yahoo but not Microsoft), said Google.cn was "a step backwards in terms of freedom of expression issues."

"It will leave the Chinese populace with less and less ability to, in a sense, think for themselves about some of the issues facing them today," Spiegel said. "They are going to have a restricted diet of info and that is going to colour how they view the world. It's a big story, and it's a stain on their image."

Adrienne Verrilli, communications director for the Sexuality Information and Education Council (blocked from Google.cn), said valuable, life-saving Web sites are often blocked in censorship sweeps.

"I guess the Chinese people aren't allowed to get good sexual health information," Verrilli said. "That's unfortunate and disappointing. We have such good information for the Chinese, who are going to be steeped in their own HIV/AIDs crisis very shortly."

Google's Brin told Fortune magazine this week that "if there's any kind of material blocked by local regulations, we put a message to that effect at the bottom of the search engine." Tests show, however, that the message tends to appear only for political sites such as Tibet and Falun Gong, and not the other categories of information censored from Google.cn.