Chris Soghoian has a fascinating article about filtering of search engine results in Argentina. This is different from what we write about that happens in China, where the lens is distorted. In Argentina, if you search for certain people using Yahoo!, you get back nothing at all. And it’s not because of official government policy; it’s because of private litigation. Someone simply goes to court and asks the judge to make them disappear, the judge enjoins the search engine company, and disappear they do. Google responds differently than Yahoo!, and there are many easy workarounds for those who experiment, but it seems to be a great leap forward in treating search engines just as a manipulable tool, not a public utility.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Censorship and free speech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.