What the fuck Google... Just when you thought the internet was free we find out that it isn’t. In a 48 hour span Google the world biggest search engine has done a flip flop more then a Brett Favre come back.
A Blog containing a photo of Michelle Obama with monkey features was first discovered by Google about a month ago and was removed because of malware infringement. However another site has posted without malware and Google bound by its internal rules wont restrict the search. Moving forward Google has issued another statement saying that they are going to remove the search. With a caption: “Offensive Search Results"
I am going to first off say that I am unfortunately never surprised that there are still millions, that right I said it millions of racist people still living amongst us.
But should Google have removed the image? They say they believe in free speech and the Internet should be open to all kinds of things and offensiveness alone is not enough to remove content. Or is it? Does it depend on the nature of the offence, who they’re offending etc? The Internet slash the World Wide Web is just that. Google involvement upset the natural order of things, they are a publicly traded company and have a lot at stake if their perception changes, will people begin to use Bing, Yahoo, Bloglines, etc. for their searches.
My question is how does a Michelle Obama image search, out of all the times she has been captured by cameras bring back a racist blog post in it’s top 10 top 50 top 100 searches. Something has to drive that traffic. We need to look at not censorship, but righteousness. Is the reason the search vaulted to the top because Google allowed the content or because people wanted to she Michelle Obama with a monkey face? Does the fact that so many people searched for the image mean that the country or the world is stuck in such a racial confine that then enjoyed seeing the first lady denigrated in that way? Or is the fact that people are so inquisitive that when they hear about the post they race to the internet to see what the image was?
In my opinion the internet needs be free, free from the Techies who manipulate the information to bring it to the foreground, free from the Corporations who monitor the sites and try market the traffic for their personal gains, free from partisanship, no left or right wing thoughts should dominate the information The only restrictions that should be in place is that there is a strong operating framework in place. Let the people govern the internet and we will see if the racist will be verbally stoned for their hatred.
