Google reports ‘alarming’ rise in censorship requests from government

According to a “transparency report” released by Google, the United States and other western governments are increasing efforts to censor Internet search results and YouTube videos. In a blog post on Sunday, senior policy analyst at Google Dorothy Chou wrote, “It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect — Western democracies not typically associated with censorship.” She continued, “For example, in the second half of last year, Spanish regulators asked us to remove 270 search results that linked to blogs and articles in newspapers referencing individuals and public figures, including mayors and public prosecutors. In Poland, we received a request from a public institution to remove links to a site that criticized it. We didn’t comply with either of these requests.”

The report said that in the last half of 2011, United States agencies requested Google to remove 6,192 individual pieces of content from its search results, blog posts, or other archives of online videos. That number is up 718 percent compared to the 757 items that U.S. agencies asked Google to remove six months prior. In 2010, Google complied with 87 percent of U.S. requests to remove content, and complied with at least 42 percent of the removal requests in the last half of 2011. The technology company says it hopes the data will offer a “small window into what’s happening on the Web at large.”