The Guardian,
Dominic Rushe in New York, Monday 18 June 2012
 |
| Over six months Google complied with 47% of requests for content removal and 65% of court orders. Photograph: Jonathan Hordle/Rex Features |
There has
been an alarming rise in the number of times governments attempted to censor
the internet in last six months, according to a report from Google.
Since the
search engine last published its bi-annual transparency report, it said it had
seen a troubling increase in requests to remove political content. Many of
these requests came from western democracies not typically associated with
censorship.
It said
Spanish regulators asked Google to remove 270 links to blogs and newspaper
articles critical of public figures. It did not comply. In Poland, it was asked
to remove an article critical of the Polish agency for enterprise development
and eight other results that linked to the article. Again, the company did not
comply.
Google was
asked by Canadian officials to remove a YouTube video of a citizen urinating on
his passport and flushing it down the toilet. It refused.
Thai
authorities asked Google to remove 149 YouTube videos for allegedly insulting
the monarchy, a violation of Thailand's lèse-majesté law. The company complied
with 70% of the requests.
Pakistan
asked Google to remove six YouTube videos that satirised its army and senior
politicians. Google refused.
UK police
asked the company to remove five YouTube accounts for allegedly promoting
terrorism. Google agreed. In the US most requests related to alleged harassment
of people on YouTube. The authorities asked for 187 pieces to be removed.
Google complied with 42% of them.
In a blog
post, Dorothy Chou, Google's senior policy analyst, wrote: "Unfortunately,
what we've seen over the past couple years has been troubling, and today is no
different. When we started releasing this data, in 2010, we noticed that
government agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove
political content that our users had posted on our services. We hoped this was
an aberration. But now we know it's not.
"This
is the fifth data set that we've released. Just like every other time, we've
been asked to take down political speech. It's alarming not only because free
expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries
you might not suspect – western democracies not typically associated with
censorship."
Over the
six months covered by the latest report, Google complied with an average of 65%
of court orders, as opposed to 47% of more informal requests.
Last month
Google announced it was receiving more than one million requests a month from
copyright owners seeking to pull their content from the company's search
results.
Fred von
Lohmann, Google's senior copyright counsel, said copyright infringement was the
main reason Google had removed links from search terms.
He said the
company had received a total of 3.3m requests for removals on copyright grounds
last year, and was on course to quadruple that number this year. The
company complied with 97% of requests.
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