Wednesday, October 8, 2008

German NPD Party in Google News

Google News is moderated by editors to decide which news sources to accept. How well do they do in figuring out relevant sources? Well, in Germany, they happened to accept a source with the official sounding name “News from Lower Silesian and Upper Lausitz” (“Nachrichten aus Niederschlesien und der Oberlausitz”). A glance at the domain “npd-loebau-zittau.de” and a further look at the site’s imprint however will reveal that these are releases issued by the NPD, a German right-wing (or, depending on your view, neo-nazi) party. A search for site:npd-loebau-zittau.de in Google News lists 54 items so far.

I would think diversity is good in a news aggregator (as opposed to showing mostly duplicates, or removing sources based on government pressure, as Google did in China), but I’m not sure Google wants to have news releases issued by a specific party in there, nevermind which party. I could be wrong; if you know of other examples of party releases in Google News, please comment.

[Thanks Mathias Schindler!]

Update: Hebbet in the comments points to other parties who are part of Google News as well (like the FDP), so I suppose this might be normal in Google News. It would be interesting to know though if it’s also common for the source to be undisclosed if you just look at the title of the site. [Thanks Hebbet and Mathias!]

German NPD Party in Googl ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (6)

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