Friday, June 23, 2006

Google Removing Sites Which Can Otherwise Be Reached

There’s an interesting bit on the Google China self-censorship discussion which is new to me: Google.cn doesn’t only remove sources which are “blocked anyway” in the country – they also censor sites in results, based on gov’t request, which can otherwise be reached fine (from at least certain parts of the country). In any case, that’s the result of the findings a source from within China provides to me; I can’t check it myself as I’m not in China.

My source – Ben, a foreigner in China – tells me the following sites can be reached fine on Friday, 7:30 PM in the Zhabei district of Shanghai; all sites which, as I recently posted on, are being self-censored by Google.cn:

• 123go.to
  (see how it’s censored on Google.cn, at least at this time)
• en.chinabroadcast.cn
• adultswim.com
• african-geopolitics.org
• angelfire.com
• counter-free.net
• cryme.com
• imh.org
• invisionfree.com
• sauteenacoochee.org
• softwarea.com
• teenmusic.com
• tellingstories.net
• threethirteen.net

This is just a small sample list, of course. Now, in many cases (outside of above list), the site which is censored in Google is also blocked nationwide, like the international version of the BBC news site. In other cases, sites which do appear in Google.cn may be blocked once you click them, such as is the case with Wikipedia, as my source tells me.

All this being said, we should note that Chinese users must not rely on Google.cn – even without technical knowledge of how to workaround the internet censorship, they can go to Google.com (as they could before)... at least from within Shanghai, at least most of the time. In other parts of the country, Google.com had been blocked often lately; I do feel there is a possible connection between having a “working” Google.cn, and for the Chinese gov’t to increase the blocking of Google.com (because less users may protest, as they now have a self-censored fallback provided by Google).

Google Removing Sites Whi ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (22)

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