Censorship in Italy
December 16th, 2009
Someone from the lab this afternoon remarked that you cannot find pictures of Berlusconi right after the attack in Milan using Google Images. I immediately went to check this, searching for “berlusconi attack“, “berlusconi blood” and “berlusconi milano attack“. I found no such picture. My colleagues were soon discussing censorship. According to Freedom House, Italy is one of the two countries in western Europe (the other one being Turkey) which with respect to press freedom is classified only “partly free”.
Yahoo image search, however, yields a couple of pictures, so I’m not sure if or how the Italian government could pressure Google into removing said pictures from its search results when they didn’t do the same with Yahoo.
The fact that the pictures don’t appear on Google is certainly very strange.
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