Sunday, September 9, 2012

Search Engines Censor "National Education" and "Scholarism" (Name of Hong Kong National Education Opposition Group)


These screenshots, taken on September 8 and 9, 2012, show that searches for "National Education" (国民教育) and "Scholarism" (学民思潮) on Baidu returned no results, just a notice saying: "Search results may not comply with relevant laws, regulations, and policies, and have not been displayed. It is suggested you try other related terms." (搜索结果可能不符合相关法律法规和政策,未予显示。建议尝试其他相关词。)

As these screenshots show, many other search engines, including Jike, Qihoo, Sogou, and Youdao, were also completely censoring searches for these terms.
Results for "National Education"
Results for "Scholarism"













The only exceptions were:

  • Qihoo (which restricted search results for "national education" to news websites and the Hudong wikipedia site) 
  • Yahoo.cn (which restricted searches for both terms to a white list of about a dozen websites controlled by the central government and Communist Party)
  • Soso (which as of September 9 was not censoring search results for either term).

Previous posts on censorship relating to Hong Kong's national education protests:



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