Google, Pakistan, and censorship
Google has now refuted part of a recent Reuters story the news agency published (since corrected) about the company’s alleged agreement with the Pakistani authorities that has led to a ban on YouTube being lifted there and that I quoted a few days ago about the way different governments censor or control access to the internet.
Specifically, Google insists it has not reached any agreement with the Pakistani government about removing certain content on YouTube: videos that the authorities in Islamabad might consider offensive and want removed will be reviewed by the company, and if they are found to breach the site’s terms and conditions, they will be removed. Google has not given the government of Pakistan the right to remove content from the local version of YouTube, and instead, as happens in all other such cases, any request for material to be removed will be published in the site’s biannual transparency report.
Pakistan is a complex country: opponents of censorship are active, and there is an ongoing debate about content blocking: the government was recently forced to backtrack on a national censorship plan in the face of widespread opposition.
In reality, Google already offers local content-oriented versions in more than 90 countries, and is currently about to add Nepal and Sri Lanka to the list. These versions give local content producers a boost, as well as being in the country’s main language. But the company says it has never cut any deals with governments about withdrawing content.
Activists in Pakistan say the government has sought to portray the return of YouTube there as a political victory, but this is not the same as actually having the means to filter any content it disagrees with.
Google understands that content will continue to be removed from YouTube around the world at local level, but it insists that removal is not subject to any government’s agenda: content will be removed when it is considered to have infringed the site’s policies, not at a government’s request. This key difference raises a number of questions: we live in a tremendously diverse world in which something I might find amusing will be deeply offensive to somebody else, or even illegal. Managing diversity is not easy. In Turkey, for example, content on YouTube and other platforms, such as Twitter, have been blocked by the authorities because they were deemed offensive to the father of the nation, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, or because they speculated about corruption involving the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and are far from unusual: see Wikipedia’s series on censorship, which now includes 53 countries.
This is the reality of the world today: the internet as a global network has to be seen in the context of political, religious, cultural, and even economic factors, along with many others. Yes, the internet is a global network, in the same way that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights should be respected globally, but isn’t.
(En español, aquí)
