Google tried to warn us back in 2012… why did we not heed their warning?

Google warned of a threat to free speech after a transparency report revealed a rise in government censorship requests

As I was researching Google related topics for an article I’m working on, I discovered some reports from 2012 that highlight warnings from a higher-up at Google, alongside the release of a transparency report that detailed an increase in censorship requests from Western Governments, including the US.

This is the moment I realized that the collusion of big tech and government to censor Americans speech has been an ongoing issue, spanning over a decade.

CNN cited statements pulled from a blog post published by a Senior Policy Analyst at Google, Dorothy Chou, where she claimed that free expression was at risk, and that her reason for suggesting this was rooted in the fact that WESTERN NATIONS were amongst those calling on Google to censor — nations not typically associated with these practices.

“It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect – Western democracies not typically associated with censorship,” Dorothy Chou, a senior policy analyst at Google, wrote in a blog post on Sunday night.

The Guardian also reported on this matter. In their report, they included a portion of her blog post where she elaborated on what she had seen taking place — things that she hoped were simply an aberration.

“Unfortunately, what we've seen over the past couple years has been troubling, and today is no different. When we started releasing this data, in 2010, we noticed that government agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove political content that our users had posted on our services. We hoped this was an aberration. But now we know it's not.”

In hindsight, it’s clear this was the early stages of what is now called the Censorship Industrial Complex. This vast network of government agencies, social media platforms, non profits, and other NGO’s has grown to be a major threat to our democratic institutions, and it’s a problem that seems to have been largely ignored up until the past few years.

Back then, Google was complying with requests for the removal of search results to different blogs posts or archives of certain videos. They provided some examples to CNN that can be found in this article released on June 19th 2012, and I’ll focus on the instances involving the US entities.

• In the last half of 2011, U.S. agencies asked Google to remove 6,192 individual pieces of content from its search results. This was reported as a 718% increase from the the number of requests seen only 6 months earlier.

• They also received 187 takedown requests from law enforcement agencies, citing a 103% increase from its previous reporting period.

• A U.S. law enforcement agency asked Google to take down a blog that “allegedly defamed a law enforcement official in a personal capacity.” The company did not comply with that request.

• A separate law enforcement group asked Google to take down 1,400 YouTube videos (Google owns YouTube) because of “alleged harassment.”

Google had turned down many of the requests from the authorities, quite similar to what we saw with Twitter when the intelligence agencies began pressuring higher-ups to comply with similar censorship requests. However, they still complied with 42% of content take-down requests stemming from government organizations in the first half of 2011. They said this was actually less than previous years.

They admitted to complying with 87% of take down requests in the latter half of 2010. When compared to other western nations, Google had the highest rate of compliance with requests from the US government. For example, the rate of compliance was 24% regarding requests from Canada, 44% from France and 64% from the United Kingdom.

CNN also included this sentence in their report:

“Google says it hopes the data will offer a ‘small window into what’s happening on the Web at large.’”

And boy, were they right.