Baidu’s censoring stock market search results…but the EU is as bad

China is censoring Baidu’s search results related to the stock market crash.

BREAKING: China’s top search engine Baidu is censoring search results related to stock market crisis #BlackMonday http://pic.twitter.com/cPWXiNG9DP

— George Chen (@george_chen) August 24, 2015

Chinese censorship once took down this website.

When controversial artist Ai Weiwei was arrested in April 2011 our Twitition.com platform was used to campaign for his release. When the online petition started to gain traction we were subjected to a DDoS attack which took down Twitition, Branded3.com, and several client websites hosted on our servers (don’t worry – we’ve learned).

Censorship of search results is still censorship. Rather than removing data outright, both China and the EU are preventing access to information that is in the public interest.

Displaying information that should be considered to be in the public interest is the purpose of a search engine like Google. If the public doesn’t express a desire to find that information by entering an appropriate search query then the offending page will never be surfaced in search results, which makes the ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling obsolete. Or to put it another way:

1. When a searcher enters a query she expresses intent to find specific information
2. The search engine determines which information could be the specific information she could be looking for and displays those results to the searcher
3. Unless the searcher clicks ‘I’m feeling lucky’ she has a choice of information that the search engine has determined to be the most relevant to her search query

Any result receiving search traffic can therefore be determined to be in the public interest. Removing a search result receiving traffic from Google therefore amounts to censorship.

Seemingly the difference between the ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling and Baidu’s censorship of results about the stock market is freshness.

Freshness isn’t always the best benchmark for determining relevance of the information, as Google well knows.

Query deserves freshness (QDF) is the algorithm Google uses to determine when a particular search query would benefit more from recently published pages, as opposed to evergreen content.

As this is algorithmic it can be considered to be unbiased. Impartial, at least in comparison to individuals who have a vested interest in removing a particular search result that refers to themselves.

In search results where QDF is not applied – that is, the algorithm has determined that there is no benefit to the user if the search engine favours recently published content – the age of the content should not be used as a benchmark for whether or not the information contained within is in the public interest. Therefore, under the criteria for an individual to have a ‘right to be forgotten’, the page should not show up in a search query that does not deserve freshness. Otherwise this amounts to censorship.

According to the ruling pages could be erased (forgotten) if “the data are no longer necessary in relation to the purposes for which they were collected or otherwise processed”.

The debate is therefore around the purpose of journalism. It would be reasonable to assume that the most likely form of content to be requested to be removed is an exposé. Therefore the purpose of the publication of that data (information) was to expose an individual or entity, therefore the content should still be considered to be relevant and removing it amounts to censorship.

“Google will have to assess deletion requests on a case-by-case basis and apply the criteria mentioned in EU law and in the European Court’s judgement”.

The ruling does not state the manner in which the information must be assessed, therefore the application of QDF in assessing whether or not the data in question is “in the public interest” is perfectly justified.

If we are to term China’s censorship of search results informing its people of the state of its economy amounts to fascism then the EU’s privatisation of the same process is basically a racket.

Members of the EU have been critical of China’s government preventing its people from access to information which is in the public interest for years…

…whereas the EU outsources its censorship. How very democratic.

Source: Branded

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