Europe Blog
Our views on the Internet and society
Worrying restrictions on Internet access in Russia
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Online freedom of expression is a global issue and threats to it come from all over the world. Just last
week, we faced a challenge from far-off Siberia. A district court in a city of Komsomolsk-on-Amur in the Russian Far East, ordered Internet access provider Rosnet to block access to all content on YouTube.com
because one user had uploaded a video deemed problematic on grounds of ultra-nationalism.
As a result, some
Russian Internet users will no longer have access to the myriad of legitimate online content and video available on services such as YouTube, including, ironically, the Russian President’s own
YouTube Channel
. YouTube users upload more than 24 hours of video every minute.
Encouragingly, many influential Russian commentators have called for the ban to be lifted. The well-known Russian blogger Anton Nossik denounced “the verdict’s ignorance,” saying it “is typical to the whole Russian legal proceedings of Internet-related cases.”
The court order draws attention to an important broader issue. No provisions in the Russian legal system protect neutral online hosting platforms from being held directly liable for the content uploaded by third parties. In the European Union countries, a strong e-commerce directive offers such “intermediary liability protection.” The U.S. offers similar legal protection to hosting platforms.
YouTube is a responsible online platform. We have global community guidelines
to what is and isn’t acceptable. On the site YouTube, our millions of users flag content they deem to be potentially breaching these terms. Flagged videos are reviewed 24x7. If deemed to violate the guidelines, videos are removed from the site.
We look forward to working with the Russian authorities, the legal community and fellow web services to establish a similar environment in Russia. A single potentially inappropriate video should not lead to the blocking of a legitimate online service offering millions of legitimate, useful, commercial and entertaining videos.
Posted by Marina Zhunich, Russia Policy Manager
Celebrating Freedom Of Expression in Poland
Friday, July 2, 2010
When I last visited Gdansk two decades ago, the independent Solidarity movement had just won a resounding victory in the communist world’s first free elections. Since then, I have seen Poland transformed into a prosperous democracy and I recently returned to speak at the
All About Freedom festival
addressing the meaning of freedom of expression in the Internet age.
It is tempting to compare Solidarity with the evolution of the Internet. Just like Solidarity, the Internet has proven a powerful grass-roots force for freedom of expression. At a newly created Solidarity Museum, a room is devoted to the underground press that flourished under one party communist restrictions. Any future Internet museum will surely contain rooms about the power of bloggers uploading their own opinions around the world and videos taken by mobile phone and posted on YouTube in places like Iran.
For much of the 1980s, the totalitarian regime in Poland attempted to crush Solidarity, declaring martial law and imprisoning its founder Lech Walesa and other Solidarity leaders. Today, it’s clear that certain governments are attempting to control their citizens by monitoring or censoring information on the Internet. We’re also seeing a general increase in the number of requests from democratic governments - for information about Internet users or for removal of information from Google’s index of the web. Some of these requests are legitimate and based in the rule of law and we honor them. In the interests of transparency, however, we recently launched an online
Government Requests
tool to show where these requests originate.
Poland certainly values free expression. My colleague, Susan Pointer, is in Krakow this weekend, speaking in the ‘New Technologies for Democracy’ session at the
High-Level Democracy Conference
. She will be focusing on the important role that technology - and internet technology in particular - can play in facilitating communication, participation, transparency and accountability in decision-making across the world.
In the end, Solidarity emerged victorious from its long struggle by sticking to its values of non-violence, free speech and multi-party democracy. Where governments try to crack down on the free exchange of ideas on the web, I believe the web’s innate openness will end up triumphing.
Posted by William Echikson, Head of Communications South, East Europe, Middle East and Africa
Social Campaigning on YouTube
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
I had the pleasure last week to represent Google and YouTube at an
award ceremony
in the Italian Parliament in Rome to celebrate the winning short films in a competition titled
Action for Women
. This initiative was jointly organised by the Parliament and the Council of Europe to raise awareness of human rights and, in this case, specifically of women’s rights and violence against women.
YouTube served as the platform for the competition and aspiring film directors competed by uploading their short-film entries to Action for Women’s YouTube channel. A prestigious panel of judges, including the Venice Film Festival’s Enrico Magrelli and film directors such as Francesca Comencini and Jaco Van Dormael then shortlisted the entries, with YouTube viewers voting online to select the final three. The powerful winning films, shown during the ceremony, were:
First-prize winner, Corrado Ceron, has been awarded a screening during the forthcoming Venice Film Festival in September. But just as important, all the eligible videos remain available through the Action for Women YouTube Channel, and therefore go on raising public awareness about the personal and societal damage caused by violence and aggression against women.
During the ceremony, I spoke about how the Internet can help underpin fundamental human rights and raise awareness for social campaigns. Action for Women is a great example of this - a creative initiative that reached out to a global audience, mobilised public participation, engaged proactively with the wider community and which can now incorporate user feedback to inform future similar campaigns.
As Gianfranco Fini, President of the Italian Lower House, underlined during the ceremony, the Internet is a fundamental tool for enabling democratic participation. Deborah Bergamini MP - behind the original idea for Action for Women - added that the Internet is an important space for women in particular to express themselves freely. Giorgia Meloni, Italian Youth Minister, called on political institutions to look at how they can take advantage of the Internet’s great communication opportunities rather than just focusing on its challenges.
For our part, we were of course delighted to partner with this initiative - which brought together 516 films and generated more than six million channel views. We look forward to seeing more individuals and organisations make use of internet platforms such as YouTube to promote good causes and advance respect for human rights.
Posted by Susan Pointer, Director, Public Policy & Government Relations, Southern & Eastern Europe, Middle East & Africa
Greater transparency around government requests
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Article 19 of the
Universal Declaration on Human Rights
states that "everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." Written in 1948, the principle applies aptly to today's Internet -- one of the most important means of free expression in the world. Yet government censorship of the web is growing rapidly: from the outright blocking and filtering of sites, to court orders limiting access to information and legislation forcing companies to self-censor content.
So it's no surprise that Google, like other technology and telecommunications companies, regularly receives demands from government agencies to remove content from our services. Of course many of these requests are entirely legitimate, such as requests for the removal of child pornography. We also regularly receive requests from law enforcement agencies to hand over private user data. Again, the vast majority of these requests are valid and the information needed is for legitimate criminal investigations. However, data about these activities historically has not been broadly available. We believe that greater transparency will lead to less censorship.
We are today launching a new
Government Requests tool
to give people information about the requests for user data or content removal we receive from government agencies around the world. For this launch, we are using data from July-December, 2009, and we plan to update the data in 6-month increments.
Read this post
to learn more about our principles surrounding free expression and controversial content on the web.
We already try to be as transparent as legally possible with respect to requests. Whenever we can, we notify users about requests that may affect them personally. If we remove content in search results, we display a message to users. The numbers we are sharing today take this transparency a step further and reflect the total number of requests we have received broken down by jurisdiction. We are also sharing the number of these content removal requests that we do not comply with, and while we cannot yet provide more detail about our compliance with user data requests in a useful way, we intend to do so in the future.
As part of our commitment to the
Global Network Initiative
, we have already agreed to principles and practices that govern privacy and free expression. In the spirit of these principles, we hope this tool will shine some light on the scale and scope of government requests for censorship and data around the globe. We also hope that this is just the first step toward increased transparency about these actions across the technology and communications industries.
Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer
Controversial content and free expression: a refresher
Monday, April 19, 2010
Two and a half years ago, we outlined
our approach to removing content
from Google products and services. Our process hasn’t changed since then, but our recent decision to stop
censoring
search on Google.cn has raised new questions about when we remove content, and how we respond to censorship demands by governments. So we figured it was time for a refresher.
Censorship of the web is a growing problem. According to the
Open Net Initiative
, the number of governments that censor has grown from about four in 2002 to over 40 today. In fact, some governments are now blocking content before it even reaches their citizens. Even benign
intentions
can result in the specter of real censorship. Repressive regimes are building firewalls and cracking down on dissent online -- dealing harshly with anyone who breaks the rules.
Increased government censorship of the web is undoubtedly driven by the fact that record numbers of people now have access to the Internet, and that they are creating more content than ever before. For example, over 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute of every day. This creates big challenges for governments used to controlling traditional print and broadcast media. While everyone agrees that there are limits to what information should be available online -- for example child pornography -- many of the new government restrictions we are seeing today not only strike at the heart of an open Internet but also violate Article 19 of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
, which states that:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
We see these attempts at control in many ways. China is the most polarizing example, but it is not the only one. Google products -- from search and Blogger to YouTube and Google Docs -- have been blocked in 25 of the 100 countries where we offer our services. In addition, we regularly receive government requests to restrict or remove content from our properties. When we receive those requests, we examine them to closely to ensure they comply with the law, and if we think they’re overly broad, we attempt to narrow them down. Where possible, we are also transparent with our users about what content we have been required to block or remove so they understand that they may not be getting the full picture.
On our own services, we deal with controversial content in different ways, depending on the product. As a starting point, we distinguish between search (where we are simply linking to other web pages), the content we host, and ads. In a nutshell, here is our approach:
Search
is the least restrictive of all our services, because search results are a reflection of the content of the web. We do not remove content from search globally except in narrow circumstances, like child pornography, certain links to copyrighted material, spam, malware, and results that contain sensitive personal information like credit card numbers. Specifically, we don’t want to engage in political censorship. This is especially true in countries like China and Vietnam that do not have democratic processes through which citizens can challenge censorship mandates. We carefully evaluate whether or not to establish a physical presence in countries where political censorship is likely to happen.
Some democratically-elected governments in Europe and elsewhere do have national laws that prohibit certain types of content. Our policy is to comply with the laws of these democratic governments -- for example, those that make pro-Nazi material illegal in Germany and France -- and remove search results from only our local search engine (for example, www.google.de in Germany). We also comply with youth protection laws in countries like Germany by removing links to certain material that is deemed inappropriate for children or by enabling Safe Search by default, as we do in Korea. Whenever we do remove content, we display a message for our users that X number of results have been removed to comply with local law and we also report those removals to
chillingeffects.org
, a project run by the
Berkman Center for Internet and Society
, which tracks online restrictions on speech.
Platforms that host content
like Blogger, YouTube, and Picasa Web Albums have content policies that outline what is, and is not, permissible on those sites. A good example of content we do not allow is hate speech. Our enforcement of these policies results in the removal of more content from our hosted content platforms than we remove from Google Search. Blogger, as a pure platform for expression, is among the most open of our services, allowing for example legal pornography, as long as it complies with the
Blogger Content Policy
.
YouTube
, as a community intended to permit sharing, comments, and other user-to-user interactions, has its
Community Guidelines
that define its own rules of the road. For example, pornography is absolutely not allowed on YouTube.
We try to make it as easy as possible for users to flag content that violates our policies.
Here’s a video
explaining how flagging works on YouTube. We review flagged content across all our products 24 hours a day, seven days a week to remove offending content from our sites. And if there are local laws where we do business that prohibit content that would otherwise be allowed, we restrict access to that content only in the country that prohibits it. For example, in Turkey, videos that insult the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Ataturk, are illegal. Two years ago, we were notified of such content on YouTube and blocked those videos in Turkey that violated local law. A Turkish court subsequently demanded that we block them globally, which we refused to do, arguing that Turkish law cannot apply outside Turkey. As a result YouTube has been blocked there.
Finally, our
ads products
have the most restrictive
policies
, because they are commercial products intended to generate revenue.
These policies are always evolving. Decisions to allow, restrict or remove content from our services and products often require difficult judgment calls. We have spirited debates about the right course of action, whether it’s about our own content policies or the extent to which we resist a government request. In the end, we rely on the principles that sit at the heart of everything we do.
We’ve said them before, but in these particularly challenging times, they bear repeating: We have a bias in favor of people's right to free expression. We are driven by a belief that more information means more choice, more freedom and ultimately more power for the individual.
Posted by Rachel Whetstone, Vice President, Global Communications and Public Affairs
Securing online freedom
Thursday, March 11, 2010
More than ever, governments around the world are threatening online free expression. Forty countries have taken measures to limit this freedom, up from only a handful a few years ago. Google and YouTube services are or have been blocked in 25 of those nations.
On Thursday night in Paris, we took an important step to highlight this crucial issue by sponsoring the first Netizen Prize (or more elegantly, “Le Prix de Net Citoyen”) awarded by the Paris-based advocacy group
Reporters Without Borders
. And on Friday, March 12, we’ll be helping highlight the fight for Internet freedom by marking the group’s
World Day Against Cyber Censorship
on YouTube.
Fittingly, Reporters Without Borders chose to give the first Netizen Prize to the Iranian creators of the website
Change for Equality
, first established in 2006 to fight for changes in laws in Tehran that discriminate against women. That site has since become a well-known source of information on women’s rights in Iran, documenting arrests of women activists and becoming a rallying point for opponents of the regime.
Over the past year those leaders in Tehran have distinguished themselves — and earned the opprobrium of people all over the world — for their brutal crackdown on the rights of its critics to question their rule. Last year's killing of unarmed Neda Agha-Soltan during post-election protests in Tehran, seen around the world on amateur video, has become a symbol of the regime's ferocity — and the power of the Internet to reveal what governments do not want the world to see.
At the award ceremony in our Paris office, our Senior Vice President
David Drummond
said that we are at a critical point in the future of the Internet: "All of us have a choice. We can allow repressive policies to take flight and spread across the globe, or we can work together against such challenges and uphold the fundamental human right to free expression.”
David went on to praise the role of NGOs like Reporters Without Borders, the Obama Administration’s commitment to the promotion of Internet freedom and the efforts of all groups that have joined the
Global Network Initiative
. Under the initiative, major U.S. Internet companies, human rights group, socially responsive investors and academic institutions agreed to guidelines promoting free expression and protecting the privacy of their users around the world. “In the spirit of the undiplomatic American come to European shores," he said, "let me make a plea for European governments, companies and groups to rise to the occasion. Any effort that is limited to the United States is bound to fall far short of its global potential.”
Posted by Robert Boorstin, Director, Public Policy
Campaigning on the net
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Global politics will never be the same since U.S. President Barack Obama leveraged the Internet to sweep to victory. Speaker after speaker at this past week's
Personal Democracy Forum Europe Conference
pointed to Obama's campaign as a watershed, introducing a new era of digital politics. Held in Barcelona, the forum brought together 400 mainly European and American political activists, consultants, journalists, academics and bloggers who shared a strong common interest in capturing the power and potential of Internet to reinforce democracy. In my own presentation, I showed this YouTube video:
"It's safe to say that Obama would not be President today if it had not been for the Internet,'' said Scott Heifferman, co-founder of hugely successful U.S.-based Meetup Internet platform, which enables people to organize in local community groups.
Founder Andrew Rasiej
said technology "is giving power to ordinary people who can organize themselves using new tools like
Facebook
,
Twitter
and
YouTube
in order to have an impact on the political process and to petition governments to be more responsive to their everyday needs,'' he said.
Google of course strongly believes in the enabling power of information. Greater transparency and availability of information to the public and the ability for citizens to engage directly in the conversation leads in our view to greater knowledge, democratic accountability & better-informed decision-making. Many of our products - blogger, Gmail, search, YouTube, our translation technologies are designed to allow citizens to do just that - get involved and have their say. We were proud to select 20 innovators as
Google Fellows
and pay for their travel and participation at the Barcelona conference.
At the Forum, we also took the opportunity to remind delegates of just what makes the Internet such a unique platform - its openness, low barriers to entry, and a decentralised structure that allows innovation and great ideas to come from any place at any time and for any user to discover these. Fantastic examples of great grassroots projects came from all corners of the Internet globe. One, dubbed mobile micro-volunteering, encouraged computers to spend the empty hours in transit using a smart phone to sending text and images to support small NGO projects. The Personal Democracy Forum just has posted its own interesting
post-mortem
. We look forward to learning about more success stories at the next Forum meeting in Europe.
Posted by Susan Pointer, Director, Public Policy & Government Relations,
Southern & Eastern Europe, Middle East & Africa
Making YouTube a Safer Place
Monday, June 22, 2009
As a host for other people's content, YouTube aims to be a strong platform for free expression, while respecting individual choice and protecting young people from inappropriate content and exploitation. Over the past year, we've bolstered our efforts in four major areas: (1) developing clear policies about what is and is not acceptable on the site; (2) constructing robust mechanisms to enforce these policies; (3) rolling out innovative product features that enable safe behaviour; and (4) upping our educational efforts to increase user awareness of how to stay safe on the site.
We recently completed a tour of London, Amsterdam, and Brussels to discuss these developments with lawmakers, regulators, academics, civil liberties organizations, and journalists.
During the tour, we demonstrated how we deal with troublesome content. With 20 hours of video going up each minute on YouTube, we can't preview videos to make sure they comply with our rules. Our community steps in and does a great job flagging videos they think are inappropriate. We then conduct a thorough manual review of flagged videos.
In addition, we have put in place strong user controls. Users, for example, can filter out profane language in comments to videos with a new Filter W*rds feature. Currently available only in English, Filter W*rds allows users to replace profanity, lewd language, and racial epithets with ***. Of course, the option remains of leaving comments unfiltered or hiding them altogether by clicking on the arrow beside the "Comments" heading.
While in Europe, we announced the international launch of the YouTube Safety
Centre
. Localised in 17 languages, the Centre features straightforward safety tips and multimedia resources from experts and prominent safety organizations to help teens and their parents learn about issues such as cyberbullying, media literacy, and hateful content. The Safety Centre can be found via a link at the bottom of any YouTube page. The new Centre makes it easier for visitors to reach our
Help and Safety Tool
.
Protecting young people on the web is the shared responsibility of parents and families, educators, industry, and government. At YouTube, we are doing our part by providing education and tools, and by inviting local government, safety, and media literacy organisations to add their own content to the Safety Centre. In every community in which YouTube is launched, we welcome additional partners who can make the Safety Centre even more robust. As with every product at Google, our goal is to put our users' needs first.
Posted by Victoria Grand, Head of YouTube Policy, and Scott Rubin, Sr. Communications & Public Affairs Mgr
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