What is Digg?430 Comments
- Tonorific, on 09/20/2008, -56/+842Not to condone censorship in any form, but Google took a pragmatic approach to the situation. Their choices were:
1. Don't let the Chinese censors have their way and close the door to a quarter of the world and one of the fastest growing markets.
2. Let the Chinese government have their way, just like the rest of the governments around the world.
Google is a business after all and like all businesses they are beholden to the bottom line. Fortunately you can choose to not patronize Google. Or any other business that you choose. I for example, avoid Walmart. I feel that they have a destructive effect on communities.
Where does a companies sense of ethics come from and who should enforce it? You won't see the shareholders willingly take a loss so that a company 'does the right thing'. I'd say in today's climate, if the government doesn't keep business in line then it's left to consumers to act. I'm not sure where you buy your consumer goods, but I buy mine in the U.S. and 95% of what I purchase apart from food and fuel is made in China. So, I'm not sure that I'm not 'helping China' either. - LimeParrot, on 09/21/2008, -11/+406I'm not sure how Google images works but maybe it's because to the world, Tiananmen Square has cannotations of that picture but to Chinese searches it's moreso the Tiananmen Square itself (a well known structure). Maybe the algorithm somehow takes that into account?
Because if it's censorship... it's not particularly well done. Just try searching for "tiananmen protest" http://images.google.cn/images?gbv=2&complete=1&hl ... or "tiananmen tank" http://images.google.cn/images?gbv=2&complete=1&hl ... and all the pictures are there. Just saying... - ElBeh, on 09/21/2008, -15/+319The Great Firewall of China.
- juneof44, on 09/21/2008, -11/+172Yeah, do a GIS on google.co.jp for "sushi" (in English) and then do another GIS for "sushi" on google.com.
Region plays a lot in Google's results. Methinks the only association the .com users have with Tiananmen is the infamous stand-off, while users in .cn know it for much more.
And, by the way, the first image I get on a GIS for Tiananmen on .cn is of the stand-off. - androo002345, on 09/21/2008, -5/+153My senior year of high school we had a Chinese foreign exchange student and he was convinced that Tiananmen Square never happened. When our history teacher pulled out the pictures of the event he said it was all American propaganda and those pictures are fake. It was very interesting.
- Yookji, on 09/21/2008, -5/+103It's interesting that searching on google.com for '天安门' gives the censored results. Even searching for 天安门事件 (Tiananmen protests) gives only one picture of tankman on the first page. China's censors appear to be doing a good job of preventing people from posting anti-PRC things to the internet in the first place.
http://img516.imageshack.us/img516/7394/tiananmenl ... - Jareth86, on 09/21/2008, -19/+113Don't laugh. That's what Google searches will look like in the united states, ten to fifteen years from now.
- shark72, on 09/21/2008, -0/+79A few years back I was dating a woman who'd recently emigrated from China. She'd lived in Beijing, in fact, and drove by Tieneman Square pretty often. Educated, successful woman, and, like your high school friend, totally unaware of what had happened there in 1989.
- orukabir, on 09/21/2008, -3/+57I live in China, and a lot of my Chinese friends have never even seen that photo.
- chkdg8, on 09/21/2008, -12/+62Dugg for proper linux usage.
- presidentjapan, on 09/21/2008, -4/+53It's fun to jest and whatnot, but that guy is a personal hero of mine.
- Identiti, on 09/21/2008, -6/+54Oh my God.... Welcome to 2001... This was news years ago
- inactive, on 09/21/2008, -2/+50Hey, never thought of that. You might actually be onto something.
- BoneheadFarker, on 09/21/2008, -8/+50It wouldn't be so bad if their main motto wasn't "Do No Evil". That kinda sets some expectation...
- Blacksoth, on 09/21/2008, -3/+36I had a student stay at my home while he went to school and he was the son of a highly placed Communist Party member. At first he denied the existance of it, when he realized I clearly didn't believe him he then proceeded to admit it happenned but there were no weapons involved and no one got hurt. At that point I asked him what a tank was if he didn't think it was a weapon -- he just laughed and didn't give an answer. Later on we watched a movie with a chinese setting and he was shocked to see what others outside thought of China. The fact is people in China are clueless, period -- even family members of highly placed party officials.
- NumberFour, on 09/21/2008, -1/+31Thats probably because there aren't going to be many websites written in chinese talking about the massacre and protests, that are still running, that is. Considering a large majority of people who would use Chinese on a website live in China, and taken the fact that China restricts and censors web material, are you really that surprised?
- apophenic, on 09/21/2008, -0/+26This has been known for ages.
- 808ethan, on 09/21/2008, -10/+35And this is why our world is ruled by Evil.
Seriously.
Hiding the truth and teaching a lie or ignorance to people is the foundation of all evils.
Just because a business does it, it is some how the moral choice.
When someone you love dies because of a profitable decision a company made, I wonder if you will feel the same.
We must either change what a corporation is, or change the value of morals for corporations. Because the third choice is worse than communist Russia was. - popformula, on 09/21/2008, -1/+24juneof44 is right, to Westerners the only significance Tiananmen Square has is the protests in 1989, but to the Chinese it's also a key landmark in Beijing, like the National Mall in DC. Google just returns search results relevant to its users, if you're in China, chances are you're looking for pictures of the Square, if you're in the US, chances are you're trying to find out about the massacre.
- apio, on 09/21/2008, -1/+24not in china
- EvilGunOwner, on 09/21/2008, -1/+24Damn you Mongorians! You destloy my ***** wall!
- inactive, on 09/21/2008, -5/+28but wal-mart used government appropriated subsidies in every store it threw down to make competition unfair and to squeeze all the tax dollars it could out of a community. Wal-mart's hands are far from clean
- HaloZero, on 09/21/2008, -4/+25Wouldn't you search the chinese name of Tianamen (like chinese characters) not the english one on Chinese google?
- dashdingo, on 09/21/2008, -10/+30It's not Google, it's China.
- inactive, on 09/21/2008, -0/+20actually their motto is / was 'don't be evil'
not quite the same thing - inactive, on 09/21/2008, -1/+20Your comment was kind of hot. Just saying...
- KaiserArny, on 09/21/2008, -1/+20So you support a government lying and hiding the truth to it's people?
- spyd3rweb, on 09/21/2008, -5/+24Blame China, not Google. All companies must adhere to the laws of the countries they are operating in.
- Noein, on 09/21/2008, -0/+18It's covered very briefly in history class as far as I can remember and it was never described as a massacre. During the time when the event happened there was an information lock down, no one knew what exactly happened outside of Beijing. But I still find it shocking that the transfer student's parents never told him anything about it. You can censor the news but you can't censor word of mouth. I asked my parents and they remember all the rumors etc they heard back then.
- Noein, on 09/21/2008, -1/+18First of all internet censorship exists in China, not even the Chinese government denies "the great firewall of China". With that being said, this is just retarded. That's like searching for white house and expecting the first page to be all about Clinton sex scandal. The submitter searched for the word Tiananmen on Chinese Google image search, which if you ask most Chinese, they would expect pictures of the building be the top result.
If you want to see images related to Tiananmen protest, search for 天安门事件 and you'll find many images uncensored on Chinese google image search. - lukeev, on 09/21/2008, -0/+16It's not China, it's the Chinese government.
- aznpwnzor, on 09/21/2008, -2/+17just like many korea-educated koreans many believe that chinese were at first koreans and i'm not even talking about n. korea anyway just something i've heard from a few koreans
- bentrop, on 09/21/2008, -0/+15I'm not really sure if it is entirely justified to blame Google for this one, either. Google.cn might be censoring results, but the pictures actually don't proof that.
International versions of Google weight results from local sites much higher than from sites in other languages. Google.de tries to show German pages before English ones for example etc.
Google.cn is probably doing the exact same thing, but since China is already censoring basically all websites written in Chinese it has access to, that is what Google.cn will list first and it will therefor be censored. - CarStan, on 09/21/2008, -2/+17TEAR DOWN THE WALL!
TEAR DOWN THE WALL!
TEAR DOWN THE WALL! - Zervaman, on 09/21/2008, -1/+14Uhhh...no. Google is censored for China. Google got a lot of flak for that. It's not a conspiracy, it's the truth.
- kingofkolt, on 09/21/2008, -1/+14It could be that it only censors results to IP address originating in China.
- WoollyMittens, on 09/21/2008, -0/+13China is about as far removed from communism as America. I'd call it despotism at best.
- mathcreative, on 09/21/2008, -2/+15I never made this connection until Tonorfic said this post. But Wal-Mart does hurt communites, beside the fact that Wal-Marts hands aren't clean. When a wal mart comes into a community theirs nothing and I mean nothing the local shops can do. Can't cut prices, can't remodel the store to look better than Wal-Mart. Wal Mart goes and replaces "everything".
- wpyh, on 09/21/2008, -1/+131. The relationship between capitalism and democracy is merely a correlation.
2. Google, as a company, is of course only interested in money.
3. Corporations have to be amoral: if they are moral, which moral should they support? Your moral, or that other guy's? - n1eb, on 09/21/2008, -3/+15I did the same search on images.google.cn and three of the first nine results had tanks on my end.
- mcduck, on 09/21/2008, -0/+11Another funny thing is that google always lets you know your recieving cencored results;
When searching for Tianamen images, this line appears on the bottom;
"据当地法律法规和政策，部分搜索结果未予显示。"
Translation;
"According to local laws and regulations and policies, some search results were not revealed."
oh well, still sucks - inactive, on 09/21/2008, -0/+11He says "I'm not sure how Google images works but..." so I wouldn't call him an idiot when he's just putting the idea out there. Maybe he had something better to do than study how IPs affect google results in preparation for this day. And he's explaining an alternative interpretation of the results from the pic, because the submitter is saying google is censoring based on .cn vs .com, not IPs.
And I think he knows that searching for "tiananmen" on google.com from the US will result in the tanks. In fact, I think that's part of his point.
Idiot. - hollywoodphony, on 09/21/2008, -0/+11What about people who would call someone disgusting for making a joke?
- Brian48216, on 09/21/2008, -0/+11although, on the flip side- it offers pictures that might be more relevant to the physical tienanmen square as opposed to a billion pages of the same damn picture of the same damn guy standing in front of the same damn tanks.
- DarthVox, on 09/21/2008, -0/+11'They are driven by greed and above the law.'
the entire reason Google is censoring Tiananmen in China is because of the law itself! - inactive, on 09/21/2008, -1/+12I once had a job at a newspaper company in the midwest with a fairly large circulation. Not to sound like penthouse forum. One day I was at a meeting with the circulation guys because I worked on the database. They were talking about how all the advertising was different in all the different neighborhoods around the city, and even the editorials they used were different each day for the red neck parts of the city, the black parts of the city and the rich white parts of the city. I was stunned. The internet is an even better medium for that kind of thing.
- gavintlgold, on 09/21/2008, -1/+11Unless the person was crazy enough to want to install the Ubuntu theme because they *liked* it, there's no doubt that's Ubuntu.
- WoollyMittens, on 09/21/2008, -0/+10It's not likely censored from the inside out, right?
- thebigbluecan, on 09/21/2008, -9/+19YAY UBUNTU!!!!
- mrb4b00, on 09/21/2008, -1/+10Yes, Chinese users can vpn to see outside the firewall.
However, just like most of us do not browse Chinese sites regularly, most Chinese users have no need to do so vice versa.
Not everybody is bilingual. -
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