Researcher Gives Google a Thumbs Down on Impartiality
by Chad Groening
May 25, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A public-policy think tank is calling search engine giant Google to task for removing news organizations from "Google News" that have been critical of radical Islam. An official with the organization suggests the popular Internet website is practicing censorship and exercising a double-standard. Google has removed sites like New Media Journal and the Jawa Report from its Google News service for what it calls "hate speech" against Islam. Sonia Arrison, director of technology at the Pacific Research Institute, points out the move was made at the same time Google was urging Congress to pass Internet neutrality legislation.
"It's somewhat ironic that Google is trying to censor some things from its search engine at the same time as it's making this very public plea for something called net neutrality, where it's trying to use Congress and legislation to regulate the Internet so that censorship doesn't happen," Arrison notes. "So the question is, what's really going on here with Google and net neutrality and censorship?"
She points out that Google is one of several search engines that have agreed to censorship in Communist China. "They recently agreed to censor a bunch of stuff in China, which led to a lot of outrage over here in America -- but nothing changed," says Arrison, adding that Google is not alone in this instance. "Yahoo and Microsoft are also over there censoring things for the Chinese government as well."
According to Arrison, Google has also given large sums of money to Democratic candidates in the U.S., raising concerns that more conservative websites might be removed from the search engine because of their content.
"If that happens, I hope that there's a huge public outcry and [that] Google's forced by the marketplace to have to rein in some of that censorship," she says, "because when people use a search engine they expect that they're actually searching all the news -- not just some of the news that Google thinks everybody should be seeing."
Arrison suggests conservatives might have to look for alternative search engines that are not governed by a left-wing political agenda.
Chad Groening, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
