Yahoo clear winner in Chinese censorship race

Stan Beer
Saturday, 17 June 2006 12:34

Your IT - Home IT

A report by media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders said that Yahoo! was found 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.

According to the report, 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. In fact both Google and Microsoft, though certainly not squeaky clean in the eyes of Reporters Without Borders, come up in a relatively favourable light compared to their competitor Yahoo.

Reporters Without Borders says it is particularly shocked by the scale of censorship on yahoo.cn, which is even higher than local Chinese search engine Baidu. It found that the search results on “subversive” key words are 97% pro-Beijing. It is therefore censoring more than Baidu. The media watchdog was able to show that requests using certain terms, such as 6-4 (4 June, date of the Tiananmen Square massacre), or "Tibet independence", blocked Yahoo.cn for an hour before the service could be used again. According to Reporters Without Borders, this method is the same technique used by Baidu, while it is not used by any other foreign search tools.

In comparison to Yahoo, the censorship used by Google and Microsoft appears to be relatively mild, although still significant. Microsoft says it does not operate censorship, but 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.

Reporters Without Borders called for search engines operating in repressive countries to refuse to censor certain content said to be “protected”, such as information on human rights and democracy. "We are convinced that these companies can still access the Chinese market without betraying their ethical principles. They must however adopt a firm and clear position in relation to the Chinese authorities.”

You can get the full report from the Reporters Without Borders website.