Auswirkungen von Googles neuer China-Strategie

Die Effekte der Aufhebung der Zensur von Suchergebnissen durch Google bzw. die Umleitung der .cn-Domain auf die Hongkong-Seite waren erst mal nur kurzfristiger Natur, schreibt die New York Times:

Searches for “Tiananmen,” “Falun Gong” and “corruption” increased by more than 10 times here on Tuesday, the day that Google began offering uncensored Chinese-language search results. But searches for censored terms on Google’s uncensored Hong Kong search engine fell off quickly in the next few days in part because most Chinese did not rush to search for politically delicate material and also because the pages newly revealed by Google were still mostly blocked in China. In tests over the weekend from several Chinese cities, users searching for “Tiananmen” or even the names of Chinese government leaders reliably found the site google.com.hk mysteriously inaccessible for a few minutes. The more frequently used Chinese search engine Baidu, which continues to censor its results, remained accessible no matter what users searched for. ... Nonetheless, a significant number of people took advantage of Google’s newly unfiltered service on its first day of operation. There were about 2.5 million searches for phrases containing “Tiananmen” and about 4.7 million searches for the banned religious group “Falun Gong,” according to estimates based on data from the Google Trends and Google Keyword Tool Box. But these are tiny numbers compared with almost 400 million Chinese Internet users, and search activity quickly returned to average levels over the next few days. ... Meanwhile, the Chinese government has begun a concerted campaign to eradicate pro-Google sentiments from the Internet. Comments on social networking sites that are supportive of Google “will be deleted in a couple of seconds,” said Oiwan Lam, 38, an independent journalist and researcher who is an expert on Chinese independent media.

Report zur Selbstzensur von Suchmaschinen in China

Das Citizen Lab am Munk Centre for International Studies der University of Toronto hat einen Bericht zur Selbstzensur großer westlicher Suchmaschinenbetreiber in China veröffentlicht. Bei Technology Review gibt es eine Zusammenfassung:

a new analysis suggests that search companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, are independently deciding what to censor and could be censoring more information than Chinese laws demand. ... "The low overlap means that companies are choosing the exact content to censor or, alternatively, to not censor," says Nart Villeneuve, a senior research fellow at the Citizen Lab and the author of the report. "That doesn't mean that they're not getting guidance from the Chinese government in other ways," he notes. But Villeneuve says that if search engines are interpreting Chinese policies to decide what to censor, that introduces the possibility that they may block more content than is strictly necessary. ... according to Villeneuve's report, even with the self-censoring, foreign search engines provide about 20 percent more content on average than Internet users in China would otherwise be able to access through domestic search engines. But, he says, "The bigger issue is just that we don't know exactly what they're doing, and the search engine companies haven't been open publicly about what they're doing." ...

Villeneuve found 313 websites that were censored by at least one of the search engines during at least one of the tests he conducted. However, only 76 were censored at least once by all four, and, of those, only 8 were censored by all four each time he tested. Google had the lowest average number of censored sites, at 15.2 percent of those tested. Microsoft censored 15.7 percent of sites, followed by Yahoo at 20.8 percent and Baidu at 26.4 percent. Another characteristic Villeneuve tested was transparency, meaning how clearly a search engine notifies a user that a result has been censored. He found that Google maintained the highest transparency