The Sociolinguistics of Censorship
Google News is making news, along with the United Nations, and small fry media outlet Inner City Press. It’s quite a scandalous affair really, with Inner City Press playing the role of “pint-sized Internet” whistleblower, exposing corruption and causing controversy within the bloated U.N. organization.
As it turns out, Inner City Press is actually just one person, with one “beat,” the United Nations Development Program. It also turns out that a “user” alerted Google to the fact that Inner City Press violates the Google News ground rule that listed organizations must have a minimum of two employees.
Matthew Lee, the Renaissance man behind Inner City Press received an e-mail from Google informing him that he had been “de-listed” from Google News, and shortly thereafter, his stories were no longer available through the powerful aggregator. Lee is rather suspicious that the U.N. is behind it all, hypothesizing a sinister plot to the effect of “I think they said, ‘If we can’t get this guy out of the U.N., let’s disappear him from the Internet.’”
While it is unfortunate that Google is apparently now desensitized to censorship at the expense of minority voices, there is a concurrent and less marginal outcry criticizing how difficult it is to “disappear” oneself from the internet. The transitive status of published content on the web is an issue that will probably be hotly debated for some time to come, particularly as it relates to who controls the removal of content. While the long term social implications are unclear, we can at least confirm that “disappear” is now officially a transitive verb.
(via Fox News)
Filed under: Current Affairs, Web/Tech
