From CBC Radio-Canada
China wants to bury the truth about Tiananmen. Will Google help?
By CBC Radio
Deirdre Mulligan is an associate professor and faculty director at Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. As It Happens host Carol Off spoke with Mulligan about the potential relaunch and what it would signal to the rest of the tech industry. Here is part of their conversation.
Deirdre, if you were in China today and you wanted to know what happened at Tiananmen Square and you did a search, what would you get in the way of results?
You wouldn't find an accurate account of history and certainly not in the state involvement in the taking of human life. Most of the results, in my understanding, refer to what happened at Tiananmen Square as a riot, or they refer to it as a massacre myth from overseas, that they basically deny that the state was involved in killing and removals of peaceful protesters.
And if you, for example, do something like look at Baidu's terms of service, you get a really good sense of the sort of information that the government expects them to keep from their citizens.
Deirdre K. Mulligan is an associate professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information, a faculty director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, and a founding member of the Global Network Initiative. This interview follows an op-ed by Professor Mulligan and Daniel S. Griffin published by the Guardian.
