Ways to influence Google
How can concerned citizens, shareholders and users communicate their displeasure to Google about their decision to aggressively censor results in China? ProtestGoogle will update this post periodically with more ideas on how to get involved.
- Boycott AdSense - it will be financially imperceptible to Google, but may add a little gravitas to your voice
- Sign the open letter
- Send an email
- Write your own letter - old fashioned pen and paper can be harder to ignore than on online petition - Sergey Brin, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043
- Influence shareholders - this isn't just about ethics vs. the profit motive, shareholders care A LOT about Google's image and brand
- Shame Google employees - many Google employees don't support this action, let them know we hold them accountable if they don't speak out; make 'em hear you when they drive into the parking lot
- Write a letter to the editor - get this issue out before the general public; also, WSJ, NYT, LAT
- Write your representative - our goal isn't more legislation or government intrusion, but the opinion of lawmakers is important to Google as it tries to get access to more content and bust up the chokehold of big media and big telecom
- Shoot a viral video
- Design a protest logo
- Use an uncensored search engine
- Demonstrate on campus
- Protest at home
- Develop a parody site
- Sell t-shirts
- Write your own evil scale
- Protest at Google offices around the world
- Protest Michael Moore style, and bring a TV to give voice to the victims
- Isn't there a shareholders' meeting coming up?
- Join the virtual protest
posted by mb at 1/30/2006 08:22:00 AM
9 Comments:
What if every programmer, hacker, inventor, coder, etc. took on the idea of undermining the Great Firewall of China?
Find ways to deliver the news about freedom that Google censors, safely and easily past the firewall, and past Google, to the Chinese people.
Post your ideas here and elsewhere, build websites that deliver the news the Chinese need, but perhaps encrypted.
Create a Google app that lets Chinese see the real news.
Explore all possible ways around the barriers.
Create ways the Chinese can create blogs and send email safely to communicate within the country.
A massive array of proxy servers? Napster type networks? encryption? tunneling?
If you understand this sort of programming, YOU can be a freedom fighter!
Freedom is everyone's responsibility. Want to join the battle for freedom?
Millions of Chinese will be grateful!
My thoughts here: http://scripsit.blogspot.com/2006/01/chinese-brutality-is-immutable.html
Here's an idea, maybe it's been tried, but perhaps it'll work:
Make webpages using text which is so hideously pro-Beijing that the page is guaranteed to rank high in google.cn. Make it sound like a propaganda department masterpiece.
BUT the real news is delivered in text in images. img tags and titles also praise Beijing.
Thus: html text says in Chinese: "Glorious Worker's Collective Visits Tiananmen Square to Honor Party Leaders"
Gif images carry all the text of the REAL news. News can be updated daily or as needed by creating new images.
Perhaps the easiest way to do it is to take digital photos of pro-human-rights Chinese language newspapers, or screen captures of such websites.
Searches on Google.cn for "Tiananmen" will include the site, and by chance many people will click on the link and learn the facts.
Create and host these outside of the People's Repression of China to avoid risking lives.
The key is lots and lots of people making these pages, so as fast as Google's loyal (to whom?) employees discover a page and censor it, many more appear to take their place.
Pretty soon, Chinese looking for the real news will learn how to search for these sites: enter vomitously pro-Beijing keywords, and sift through the list of genuine CCP sites for our "fakes".
Perhaps the idea will work for a few months or even a few years. Any and all efforts will be nails in the coffin of tyranny.
Perhaps the Great Firewall will have to censor all websites which praise the Communist Party (what a pity) to stop the threat!
Wanna try? Be a freedom fighter armed with truthful Gifs? Go for it!
Please forward this idea widely, especially to anyone who can write Chinese and has basic web authoring skills.
"Don't Be Evil" Ignored:
I tried this string--who knows, it could have been a hidden feature.
http://images.google.cn/images?svnum=10&hl=zh-CN&lr=&q=tiananmen&dontbeevil
Still got the Commie Lovers Buffet of truth-free pictures.
Try, try again!
Imagine if nobody ever heard Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech? If Rosa Park's brave defiance was silenced? If all the other courageous voices of the civil rights movement had never been heard?
Imagine if all newspapers and media of that era had been censored by our government.
You know what today's America would then be like.
Why then should we accept justifications and excuses from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Cisco and all the others who, to line their pockets with cash and prop up their quarterly statements, provide China's regime with the means to keep their own Martin Luther Kings and Rosa Parks silenced?
And if it's "ok" to use American technology to prop up a terrified dictatorship halfway around the world; how will we be able to object if or when the same technology gets used at home, against you and me...
...once there is nobody left who can stand up and shout: "I have a dream!"
I looked at your blog, in part because an anti-Google blog on a Google company's site is an intiguing prospect. I appreciate your concerns, but feel that I need to raise a point:
If Google refused to agree to China's restrictions, they'd be out of China. If they are there, they can improve the quality of internat information that is available there. From a business point of view, not agreeing to China's requirements would be stupid.
Doesn't good information improve the chances that the Chinese internet users will "fill in the blanks"? I think you are misguided in attacking Google on this point.
Stop your whining. This site is a waste of time and effort.
Hey buddy. It's pretty genius that you protest Google, yet you chose to use Google's blog site to proliferate your information. I smell a hypocrite.
As explained in the FAQ, this site is not anti-Google. I'm generally happy with Google, their principles, and their services.
The practices of Google's competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft are much worse than Google's. So using a competitor's services to communicate my disappointment in Google's China policy would send the wrong message.
You may call that hypocrisy. I call it honesty. And maybe a little honesty and balance will be taken more seriously than the extreme views thrown around so cavalierly in other protests.
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