Google Censors Abu Ghraib Images [updated] 731
Mihg writes "Try searching Google Images for abu ghraib, lynndie england, or Lynndie's boyfriend charles graner and note how you don't get any pictures of US soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners of war. Now try it with some of their competitors, like AltaVista, Lycos, or Yahoo!.
Google used to be able to find them, as is discussed in this AnandTech forum thread." I'm guessing that this is another case of our administration confusing "National Security" with "Politically Undesirable". Update: 11/07 20:18 GMT by P : Google has a reasonable explanation.
The Abu Ghraib Coloring Book (Score:5, Interesting)
A small coloring book of images from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
What do you know about Abu Ghraib? What do you know about coloring books? What do you know about teaching conformity? About desensitization? About media and artist exploitation of suffering for financial gain. This swell coloring book wraps all that and more into nine pages that you can color yourself!
Re:You're guessing? (Score:3, Interesting)
If someone googlebombed them (google search for "Litigious Bastards" [google.com]), I would assume it is possible to unrank images just as it is possible to unrank webpages.
Google has only two choices with the DMCA (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:You're guessing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Freedom (Score:5, Interesting)
I do not think anyone is saying they can't do this, they are only pointing out that as customers of Googles service they find it disturbing
International law (Score:2, Interesting)
Google News (Score:3, Interesting)
Their news service already report a link to this thread under the title "Google Censors Abu Ghraib Images" [google.ca]. Now let's see if it'll remain there...
It is about time! (Score:5, Interesting)
I tried to submit this as an AskSlashdot feature on where to turn when Google's policies censor searches you want weeks ago. Thanks for finally running something on this.
I think it is high time that people woke up to what google is doing out there. We can talk a big game about google "being a privately held company" and "freedom to do what they want" and whatnot, but it is seriously frightening to me exactly what it is that they want to do to the internet, especially when they are not too terribly forthcoming about what they want.
Do any of you all use an alternate search engine? If so, post it and let us all get away from google. We claim that decentralized data is what we love the internet for, yet we all clamor to a single search engine for that data. It's incongruous and seemingly dissonant to do this.
Re:You're guessing? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Devil's Advocate (Score:3, Interesting)
Good call (Score:2, Interesting)
Personally, I would not feel right about indexing and displaying images of these people being victimized, without their consent. But there is an even bigger issue at hand here..
People, torture is very real, very horrid, and it happens to folks just like you & I every damn day. I have personally known victims of political torture, one of whom was still totally unable to sleep even 25 years after his experiences. Can you say goddamn heartbreaking? When I see torture depicted in movies and television, it makes me ill. Sorry if this is shrill, but listen up: TORTURE IS NOT FUCKING ENTERTAINMENT. To use it as such demeans the experiences of victims everywhere. These people need your support, compassion and understanding a whole hell of a lot more than the film industry needs your $9 to watch this crap.
Next time you think about seeing a film that depicts torture for your viewing pleasure, why not just send the $9 to Amnesty International, or some other human rights group that fits your own political leanings.
Re:Is this the work of Bush? (Score:2, Interesting)
You are missing something. The patriot act gives government all sorts of powers, some of which are illegal for us to know. Think about it, the ACLU sued government to see the whole patriot act, and they were denied. Government can now search your house, without a search warrent, and never tell you. Government can see all your records, bank accounts, library info and never tell you they did it. Before, government needed a warrent and the person knew what government recieved access too. Now there is no informing people they were the subject of an investigation. For all we know, one phone call from Tom Ridge to Google and the information is gone.
Re:Google just sucks (Score:2, Interesting)
Google image search [google.com]
Yahoo image search [yahoo.com]
The Yahoo one returns the images that I was expecting.
Re:You're guessing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Especially the Floyd/Mark Kvamme and Bush relationship could explain why those images were removed.
Re:It is about time! (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you have the freedom to choose? Yes. But we all know that the free market is a myth. It's a wonderful concept that we simply don't have in place. Not even here on the wild wonderful interweb. We have a more bizarre corporate oligarchy of information in place, one that is probably more insidious and subtle than the open one out there in the Real World.
Come to think of it, what the hell are you trying to say?
Re:Anti-Americanism? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ever consider that we are customers? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why are there so many apologists for those at the top of the hierarchy? That is what I want to know. Are you masochists? Authority lovers? Idolizers of success?
Understanding Google (Score:4, Interesting)
Why Politics Don't Belong on Slashdot, And other useful info . . . :-P
First off, Google is _very_ different from other search engines. They want to separate out blog content from other websites. They also put national news articles (that usually decay in a month or so) in news.google.com, and they allow users to rate websites and add their input in a magical way to PageRank. Given all of this I do not believe this could be called political as implied by the editor or censorship (since it is impossible for a private company to actually be involved in censorship). Such statements imply that Google News would also not have stories on the events that occurred in the prison, since they don't want you to know about it. I think you might be seeing the results of people looking at the sites (that have the GoogleToolbar) and rating them poorly. Moreoever, the results shown on yahoo are from news services--these things may be searched from news.google.com. Somehow a plethora of results come up there [google.com].
This brings me to my subtitle: Politics don't belong on Slashdot. No one is going to get rid of the section, and even if they did, it doesn't matter now. The entire site is now an acceptable place to insert your political opinions without actually analyzing a situation. This doesn't lead to more coherent discussion, or in this case even restraint on the part of the editor to develop a conspiracy theory in one line (without having to even develop it because so many people are already have the same mindset that they're ready to jump on anything they can). From now on, politics will be acceptable discussion on Slashdot in any topic, and for that reason I think the site's technical discussion over time may be greatly diluted.
This is neither a death wish, nor a threat to stop reading Slashdot. Slashdot may stay a good news site, but it's community is being threatened.
-Adam Colclough
Re:You're guessing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:mod nuts? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:-1, Idiotic. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've read about the many perceived problems with Google before and ignored them because Google is free to do whatever they want yadda yadda. But this is giving me a major pause.
Re:Google seems to have pro-Bush attitude (Score:2, Interesting)
Not everyone here is decked out in tinfoil.
It's people trying to find *any* justification for their belief system. They disregard all the possibilities they don't agree with. This is why Bush/Clinton/Kerry are apparently responsible for everything wrong in the world.
Lot of misconceptions here (Score:2, Interesting)
The issue however regards google's image search.
Firstly, this search has always by default filtered out offensive images, such as porn. Personally I think the Abu Ghraib images are much more offensive than a nude, so its perfectly understandable that these might be filtered out.
It does however appear that even with the filter set to off, the pictures are still not found by the picture search.
It is also worth mentioning that this has _nothing_ to do with google being 'slow' or 'old' - i.e. the pictures not showing up to it not being up-to-date. Google's normal search finds numerous sites which contain the torture images, and you can find - for example - recent images from the 2004 election already using the image search. While there is some variance in how long various images/sites take to appear on google, I find it completely implausible that this is the cause for the pictures not appearing. The original post also actually mentions that google _used_ to find these images.
Thus it would indeed appear to be a case of censorship, if only on google's images search.
Re:Arab world (Score:4, Interesting)
We know, we've told them for thirty years that this was the only way to counter the socialist menace that was threatening peace, but we can change our minds, can't we?
Currently, the level of education in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, etc. is appalling. Students are required to spend more than half of their time studying the Koran, this includes technical education. This indeed to quell any thought of a fairer form of government (read: socialism). Unfortunately, this backfired, and now the Arab world is stuck with a generation of people that have no education whatsoever and are striving for the reformation of government based upon the principles of the Koran. Well, they did follow our suggestions.
Trouble is, even if we do start to educate, with a well educated population, they might want to try socialism again, because face it, USA style capitalism is not something most people want. At least, I do not know of any stable democracy that implements it even close to the American way.
Re:Official Respons from Google. (Score:5, Interesting)
halloween 2004 [google.com]
We take this kind of stuff very seriously too, you know.
READ! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Official Respons from Google. (Score:3, Interesting)
While Google hasn't updated these pics, some of the newer pics from my school website gets updated pretty darn quickly.
Although I cannot fathom why, I'd say it's probably true especially since I've experienced it first-hand.
To those who still don't believe it (Score:5, Interesting)
My main reason is that when I do a Google Images search, the number of 404s I get when trying to see the actual pictures is fairly high; depending on the search, I think I already got over 50% broken links.
So, the indication that Google Images' index is outdated does make sense to me. Just like the guy that reported his Morgan Webb picture is still indexed "7 months after it was removed".
Now moving on, I'll happily wait for this update, so the image search gets useful again and returns more than a bunch of outdated links.