Google facilitated censorship requests from autocratic regimes from all over the world, including the Kremlin in Russia and the Chinese Communist Party. The British newspaper reports this The Observer Sunday in one research article.
The technology company has been working with governments of around 150 countries since 2011, if they want information from the public domain to be removed. The reason for this can, for example, be privacy or copyright violations.
But in addition to democratic governments, Google also waves censorship requests from autocratic regimes and governments accused of violating human rights such as Russia, China and Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban.
Google does not publish complete data on deletion requests, but does publish a ‘transparency report’ every six months containing summaries of censorship requests that the company thinks can be ‘public interest’. Sixty percent of them, discovered The Observer Based on their research, came from Russia.
Navalny removed
At the request of Russia, for example, Google removed YouTube videos showing, among other things, how Ukrainians burn a Russian flag. Content in which the now deceased opposition leader Aleksej Navalny gave tactical voting advice was also temporarily blocked during the Russian election period in September 2021.
For China, the company took about 200 videos offline and removed the content in which criticism of Chinese President Xi Jinping was distributed. Collaboration with countries such as Iran and Afghanistan can also be found in the transparency report.
According to the tech company itself, the examples from the transparency reports only offer a small glimpse into all removal requests that come in and the data is “not complete”. Much of the data from the report would also illustrate that the company opposes such requests, according to the tech company, in one of the transparency reports. Google did not respond to questions from The Observer.