As my colleague Michael Wines reports, Google has quietly unveiled a feature on its search pages in China that warns users when they type in terms that could run afoul of the country’s robust censorship network.
Google posted a video on one of its corporate blogs documenting Internet interruptions that its employees had observed in China and that were “closely correlated with searches for a particular subset of queries.” Among the problematic terms listed in the video were the Yangtze River, a weekly newspaper in Guangzhou and McDonald’s.
While government censorship appears to be at the heart of the disruptions, neither the blog nor the video mentions it directly, preferring to describe the phenomenon, tested by using 350,000 common queries, without questioning its source. As Alan Eustace, a Google senior vice president, writes on the blog:
We’ve observed that many of the terms triggering error messages are simple everyday Chinese characters, which can have different meanings in different contexts. For example a search for the single character [
江 ] (Jiāng, a common surname that also means “river”) causes a problem on its own, but江 is also part of other common searches like [丽江] (Lijiang, the name of a city in Yunnan Province), [锦江之 星 ] (the Jinjiang Star hotel chain), and [江 苏移动] (Jiangsu Mobile, a mobile phone service).
In response, Google added a warning message for users in mainland China that points out which characters are likely to cause problems — that is those terms that are being censored. Users can then retype searches without those terms.
The word Jiang sets off censors because it is also the surname of China’s former president, Jiang Zemin, noted Rebecca MacKinnon on Foreign Policy’s Web site. His name has been problematic for years, wrote Ms. MacKinnon, founder of the online blogger network Global Voices, mostly because of rumors about his health and his role in political succession in China.
“The Yangtze River itself, as well as organizations like Yangtze River Securities and Yangtze River University, are all collateral damage,” she wrote, adding that Google’s move is likely in part a business decision to lure back users who have grown frustrated at problematic searches.
Dave Lyons, an expatriate in China who writes for the Rectified.Name blog, also voiced skepticism. “While many people in China know that Google doesn’t always work because of government blocking, I’d bet that the vast majority of Internet users don’t know, or care for that matter, because if you’re planning a vacation to [丽江] where you want to stay in a [锦江
“If Google were serious about this,” Mr. Lyons wrote, “they would develop their own built-in circumvention tools, but they won’t — because that’s a bridge too far.”
China’s largest search engine, Baidu, has been accused of conducting its own internal censorship in order to conform with the government’s, allowing it to streamline its searches. Users are alerted when searches have been censored, though not with as much specificity as Google has now introduced.
For example, a search on Baidu for a book of conversations with the former mayor of Beijing during the 1989 Tiananmen uprising, published on Friday in Hong Kong, returned the following warning, according to William Farris, a Beijing lawyer who tracks online censorship: “Search results may not comply with relevant laws, regulations, and policies, and have not been displayed.”
The day before the same search for the book, in which the mayor, Chen Xitong, is quoted as saying “nobody should have died in the June 4 incident if it was handled properly” and that “the truth of the 1989 episode will be uncovered one day,” returned 500 hits, Mr. Farris said.
While search terms are censored in advance, postings to social media sites are pulled down after the fact, often resulting in the deletion of an account in addition to an individual post. Chi-Chu Tschang, a student at M.I.T. and a former China-based correspondent for BusinessWeek, looked at patterns in the deletion of posts on the most popular site, Sina Weibo.
He cannot be sure a given deleted post was taken down by censors, rather than for some other reason, according to the Nieman Journalism Lab, a blog from Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. However a paper on the project noted that politically sensitive terms are the most likely to be deleted, some almost immediately.
“The fastest a post was deleted on Sina Weibo was just over 4 minutes,” Chi-Chu Tschang wrote.