Censorship. It’s amazing how one word can simultaneously mean so much – the infringement of civil liberties, the denial of one’s human rights, the inability for information to be spread out into the world, the literary persecution of those who try.
Another word that these days means a lot: Google. According to a teacher of mine, if you’re name can’t be found on Google, you don’t exist. So imagine how alarming it would be to discover that you had effectively been murdered online.
That’s what happened to Matthew Lee, editor-in-chief of Inner City Press. Apparently, the United Nations had enough of Lee critiquing their actions, and effectively ordered Google to remove his articles from the Google News feeds. This killed not only a virtual highway of Internet traffic to his site, but also his online persona.
Google-murder is not confined to the United States. Former Chinese university professor Guo Quan, who critizised the Chinese Government, had his name removed from not only Google searches in China, but those on Yahoo! as well. Along with Tibetan and Taiwanese independence, Falun Gong and Tienanmen Square, Guo Quan cannot be found on these search engines.
An added issue with barring Guo Quan from being searchable is that the search engines also killed the online identities of every other Guo Quan in China.
In this day and age, having a presence online is incredibly important, and Google and Yahoo! effectively committed mass online murder. If they killed people in ‘real life’ they would be held firmly behind bars (most likely with a large inmate ironically named Bubba). We should not let search engines become the hitmen of our societies, constantly at the mercy of powerful corporate Mafia Dons. Knowledge is power, and the fact that these search engines make an effort to remove people to prevent them from sharing their opinions is only making society as a whole increasingly powerless.
We may not be able to stop these big online entities from trying to rub controversial people out. But at least those who get ‘rubbed out’ online can take comfort in the fact that if you’re dead on Google, in the ‘real world’, you must be doing something right.
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