There’s no way for me to know, and I am extremely skeptical (it’s such a broad concept and can apply to so many things, from slavery to abortion rights); but here is what an emailer sent me:
I was using google to find something on freedom for an essay, I tried chinese”zi you” but got a lot of junk results, then I tried “freedom”(english) and got a “The document contains no data” alert (using firefox), I tried searching some other stuff like “a”,”sadfas”,”ijefij” and such and got the alert again (although sometimes it says “the connection was rejected when attempting to contack www.google.com.”), I couldn’t even open up the google home page. After a while (about 20 minutes) everything was fine again (no problem with the gibberish, that is) but got the same problem again when I searched for “freedom” once more.
I tried using an outside proxy server and didn’t encounter any problems with this
Is this BS or are they getting totally crazed about Internet censorship?
1
By zhwj
In Beijing, I get the same result. Don’t know that I’ve ever tried searching that term before.
MSN: same failure.
Yahoo: no problem (Odd, since even though its Chinese search partner is Yisou, this shouldn’t change English results.)
May 3, 2005 @ 8:35 am | Comment
2
By booksmart
Oh my God. It’s true. How come I can still get it on Yahoo but not Google?? And why would they do this?
May 3, 2005 @ 9:19 am | Comment
3
By joann
google had already kowtowed to the CCP, wasn’t it just last year?
May 3, 2005 @ 10:25 am | Comment
4
By joann
Here it is, last year’s article abaout google cooperating with China to help censor stuff.
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/36818.html
So the word ‘freedom’ must be another blacklisted word now?
I think we’ll all just have to come up with new words to use to circumvent it, eh?
May 3, 2005 @ 10:37 am | Comment
5
By richard
Google did kowtow, but this isn’t their doing, it’s the CCP’s censorship machine. I knew they targeted phrases like Tiananmen Square — but such a broad word as “freedom” — that’s extreme.
May 3, 2005 @ 10:47 am | Comment
6
By Ivan
I got the same result. It’s true.
Communist pigs.
May 3, 2005 @ 6:55 pm | Comment
7
By Political Animal
Freedom in China
FREEDOM IN CHINA….The authorities in China have long censored internet access to news sources they dislike, but Peking Duck reports that they are now censoring Google searches for specific words. An emailer says that a Google search for “freedom” ret…
May 4, 2005 @ 7:29 pm | Comment
8
By liuzhou
“anonymouse” is also blocked on Google. Wonder why?
May 4, 2005 @ 8:31 pm | Comment
9
By Political Animal
Freedom in China
FREEDOM IN CHINA….The authorities in China have long censored internet access to news sources they dislike, but Peking Duck reports that they are now censoring Google searches for specific words. Apparently they’ve previously targeted specific phrase…
May 4, 2005 @ 8:46 pm | Comment
10
By thehorsesmouth.blog-city.com
No “freedom” for China…
I just read Richard’s post on Google searches for the word "freedom" in China and I thought surely he must be joking, so I thought I would give it a try and here is the result of my search:The page cannot be displayedThe page you are lookin
May 5, 2005 @ 6:28 am | Comment
11
By Anon
“I knew they targeted phrases like Tiananmen Square — but such a broad word as “freedom” — that’s extreme.”
Er, banning web searches on any word or phrase in order to control a populace’s access to certain information is extreme.
Now they’re just being more extreme. But let’s not pretend that what they were doing before was anything less than absolutely extreme and tyrannical censorship.
May 5, 2005 @ 11:56 am | Comment
12
By richard
Anon, I absolutely can’t argue with you. It’s just a matter of degree….
May 5, 2005 @ 12:05 pm | Comment
13
By Simon World
Google and the Great Firewall
Extracted from today’s Daily Linklets:How Google is facing up to the China question and how it reconciles with its motto “don’t be evil”. But Fons is reporting that Google has a tool that might help beat the Great Firewall, called the Google Web Accele…
May 6, 2005 @ 12:40 am | Comment
14
By CSR Asia - Corporate Social Responsibility in Asia
Who’s reading the Chinese press?
Why do English-language stories on Chinese protests get so much more attention than protest stories that break in the mainland press?
When villagers in Zhejiang protested during April, the mainstream media and blogosphere were all over it. When peop…
May 6, 2005 @ 7:55 am | Comment
15
By Garn Wraly
Actually it’s just “freedom”, it doesn’t ban searches with freedom + other words (for example: “freedom asdf” is okay)
I think it’s to keep people from looking up freedom dedicated sites
Maybe one day they’ll block the un site and ban “human rights” altogether ’cause the censoring is definitely getting worse not better (a friend of mine hosts a POKEMON site pokedream.com and got banned just recently…)
May 7, 2005 @ 3:09 am | Comment