Fergie's Tech Blog

China: Yahoo! Worst Offender in Censorship Tests on Search Engines

Via Reporters sans Frontières.

Reporters Without Borders said it found Yahoo! to be the clear worst offender in censorship tests the organisation carried out on Chinese versions of Internet search engines Yahoo!, Google, MSN as well as their local competitor Baidu.

The testing threw up significant variations in the level of filtering. While yahoo.cn censors results as strictly as baidu.cn, search engines google.cn and the beta version of msn.cn let through more information from sources that are not authorized by the authorities.

While Microsoft has just said it does not operate censorship, Reporters Without Borders found that the Chinese version of its search engine displays similar results to those of google.cn, which admits to filtering its content. Searches using a "subversive" key word display on average 83% of pro-Beijing websites on google.cn, against 78% on msn.cn. By contrast, the same type of request on an uncensored search engine, like google.com, produces only 28% of pro-Beijing sources of information. However, Microsoft like Google appears not to filter content by blocking certain keywords but by refusing to include sites considered illegal by the authorities.

posted by Fergie @ 6/15/2006 02:50:00 PM