Since I am not remotely tech-savvy I have no idea how to get Google News to carry Booman Tribune articles. But a lot of sites have figured it out, including some of the most odious Republican blog communities. According to an article by NewsBusters Google News has recently begun a purge of right-wing sites that exhibit what they consider hate speech. In the examples cited, the offense is always the same: articles about Islam and its relationship to terrorism. I have no doubt, having read some of the sites effected, that Google had good reasons to consider the articles hate speech. But I do wonder whether Google can craft a responsible policy that filters out certain types of speech without it becoming an arbitrator of political correctness. As Newsbusters points out:
According to the April 2006 Nielsen/NetRatings report, 49 percent of all searches conducted in the U.S. in March 2006 were carried out on Google. This is an astounding market share that continues to grow.
In addition, a recent study by Hitwise ranked Google News as the fifth most visited news website behind Yahoo, the Weather Channel, MSNBC, and CNN, clearly making it a growing force in news aggregation.
This penetration has given the company unprecedented influence on society. Appearing on the first page of any word search result list all but assures higher hit rates, which equates to higher revenues for e-tailers as well as brick and mortar retailers using the web to drive traffic, and more reads for news and opinion providers.
Part of the point of the Google News software is that it relies on algorithms to collect its news rather than editorial judgment. The hope is that the final product (what you see when you do a news search) will be completely unbiased. Of course, that doesn’t work if they filter out content of a certain type at the outset. In this case, they are filtering out speech that denigrates Islam and Muslims. I have two concerns with that. First, no religion should be safe from criticism or critique. Where does Google draw the line? And second, tomorrow they may decide to ban some other type of speech.
This isn’t exactly a free speech issue, as Google is under no compulsion to feature anyone’s writing in their news crawl. It’s more of a opening for a conversation about the power of Google to frame the parameters of debate. And also, how do I get them to list our stuff?
I’m not sure if they have an automated way to deterine what news sources to list, but they do have a page where you can recommend news sources:
Here is the link to the page where you can recommend BoomanTribune. This is the message I sent.
I hate to be totally silly here, but I would like to point out that while you don’t show up on Google News yet, you are the top result when people search for a pirate suit for cats. That must be worth something.
I swear, Chris is always looking for new pirate suits for the strays he takes in. It’s all he talks about.
It’s called OCD, and I’ll find a use for it one day, I swear.
BooMan – I am really struggling with the whole topic of “Free Speech.”
As one of the poorly educated masses, I have know idea on what basis the right to freedom of speech was viewed by the founders. My guess would be that it was about being able to criticize members of the government.
How that evolved into corporations having the right to “free speech” or how the college student who wanted to distribute anti-gay materials was going to use “freedom of religious expression” as her defense is also something I do not understand.
Sometimes freedom of speech “extremists” sound a lot like 2nd amendment “extremists.” Any attempt to control or limit gun ownership is viewed as a toe-hold to the loss of the right to own a weapon. It is challenging.
I have wondered if it was possible to have freedom from speech. Those who have suggested “freedom of religion” also means “freedom from religion” gave me the idea.
i am probably a free speech extremist and I oppose most forms of hate crimes legislation because I feel like a murder is a murder and an assault is an assault, and that the intent of the murder or assault should not be considered as a statutory add-on, but merely in the routine way, as a mitigating or aggravating factor in sentencing.
If students want to pass out anti-gay literature on religious grounds I can’t see a legal reason to stop them. If the literature encourages people to commit assault or something, that’s obviously different.
We have no right to free from speech or from religion. Now, some speech can constitute an assault: terroristic threats, for example. But we can’t (or shouldn’t) start classifying religiously based homophobia as a terroristic threat.
I’m sure some people will disagree with me, as Hate Crimes legislation is not unpopular among progressives. But that is how I see it.
We can protect our citizens best by using our own free speech to educate people about our differences and using our existing court system to punish those that discriminate or commit or threaten violence.
Actually it is exactly a free speech issue. The way the internet currently works is that anyone can speak, but whether anyone can hear them is another issue.
The fact is that three search engines (MSN, Yahoo and Google) control the bulk of the search traffic. Since most people find new (or news) sites by searching, these three engines effectively have control over what gets heard. I wrote about this issue here:
Google Monopoly
If you are not listed in their search database, or are indexed incorrectly you effectively don’t exist. As the recent issues with China show, censorship can be caused by the government, commercial interests, or faulty software. The result is the same.
A more dangerous trend is also emerging. Google (and a few other) are attempting to digitize all the world’s print literature. What happens in ten years when the libraries have thrown out their paper copies and rely on the one digital copy in the central server. One day the government comes in and says that item can no longer be distributed – poof it’s gone. The same thing can happen with iTunes and other digital rights management systems. Stop paying the fee and your personal collection becomes inaccessible.
Liberty and centralization don’t work well together.
There’s a pretty good discussion of getting listed on Google News here:
http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=14975
I haven’t even figured out how to get listed in Google Blogs.
Jan
An interesting article from September 2001 was posted in PC World discussing the proliferation of anti-Islamic and anti-American hate talk on the Internet and how companies were dealing with it. For example, Terra Lycos shut down Tripod sites which were soliciting money for a jihad. Yahoo & Earthlink removed sites which targeted individuals.
Google’s approach has been no manual removal of content or pre-screening of sites. Five years later, it is finally removing some sites.
In other contexts we insist that companies to exhibit good corporate citizenship. If Google removes sites that go beyond hate-speech into such things as directions for destroying infrastructure or hospitals, or how-to find and murder individuals, is this not socially responsible behavior on Google’s part? When schoolchildren say they found bomb-making directions via Google, making it easier for them to kill schoolmates, is it enough for Google to say such directions were publicly known, anyway?
Without knowing Google’s policies and details about the removed sites, it is hard to judge. For sure, though, the Republican right promoting censorship may pounce on Google’s failure to employ its technology to protect the public even though it will restrict site-access according to the preferences of the Chinese government.
I was always under the impression that it’s basically a crap shoot. While yes, you can suggest a new news source/site, the powers that be at Google HQ pick and choose what they feel is news. I know a guy who is listed in Google News; he said it just took him 2+ years of busting his ass sculpting an op-ed site to get noticed and then indexed by Google News, he didn’t do anything special on his part.