In a post on Google's official blog, entitled, "Controversial content and free expression on the web: a refresher," Rachel Whetstone, vice president of global communications and public affairs, outlined the company's approach to censoring content on Google services, in response to questions surrounding the search giant's removal of restrictions on Chinese queries through its Google.cn portal.
"Censorship of the web is a growing problem," Whetstone wrote. "According to the Open Net Initiative, the number of governments that censor has grown from about four in 2002 to over 40 today."
Whetstone says that increased Internet censorship is the result of widespread access and the ubiquitous uploading of user-generated content, including activist and other videos, posted to YouTube at a rate of 24 hours of video uploaded every minute.
"This creates big challenges for governments used to controlling traditional print and broadcast media," Whetstone blogged.
"While everyone agrees that there are limits to what information should be available online — for example child pornography," she continued, "many of the new government restrictions we are seeing today not only strike at the heart of an open Internet but also violate Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that: 'Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.'"
For its part, Whetstone says, Google deals with controversial content in different ways.
"As a starting point, we distinguish between search (where we are simply linking to other web pages), the content we host, and ads," she explained, saying that search is the least restrictive service, "because search results are a reflection of the content of the web."
Whetstone cited "child pornography, certain links to copyrighted material, spam, malware, and results that contain sensitive personal information like credit card numbers," as being excluded from search results. While a distinction is made between censoring politically sensitive material in non-democratic states such as China, Google does honor the laws of democratically elected European governments, which bar Nazi and other political materials.
"We also comply with youth protection laws in countries like Germany by removing links to certain material that is deemed inappropriate for children or by enabling Safe Search by default, as we do in Korea," Whetstone wrote. "Whenever we do remove content, we display a message for our users that X number of results have been removed to comply with local law and we also report those removals to chillingeffects.org, a project run by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, which tracks online restrictions on speech."
Google services such as Blogger, YouTube, and Picasa Web Albums are subject to more stringent content policies due to the material being hosted on the company's servers, while its advertising products are the most restrictive in the content that they allow.
According to Whetstone these policies are always evolving, but in the end, they are based upon the principles at the heart of everything the company does.
"We've said them before, but in these particularly challenging times, they bear repeating: We have a bias in favor of people's right to free expression," Whetstone concluded. "We are driven by a belief that more information means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual."