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Google Censors #OccupyWallStreet Report
by staff report - AmpedStatus Friday, Sep 30 2011, 10:56am
international / mass media / other press

[Well, join Google's information 'management' Club]

Over the past few years, we have had a few cases were Google decided to censor a report of ours from their search results. We documented one case publicly here. We usually don’t make a big deal about it online because people tend to just dismiss us as “crazy” when we do. However, this latest case is blocking our new report on the #OccupyWallStreet movement and we would like to bring it to the attention of the many supporters within the movement. The post is titled, A Report from the Frontlines: The Long Road to #OccupyWallStreet and the Origins of the 99% Movement.

After we published it late yesterday afternoon, when we checked Google and typed in the full headline, it was featured at the top of their search results . However, as of this morning, Google has removed our post from their results. As you can see from the screenshots below, our source post is not listed, only sites that have linked to it or mentioned it are. The search on the article title currently brings up 4,450 results. After going through the top 20 search pages, our post permalink doesn’t not show up at all. Other posts from our site do, just not this one report. You can see below that people discussing the post on our social network are showing up in the results.

For those who make the argument that other sites linking to the report may be listed before us, we would like to make clear that sites always pick up on our reports and we are still always listed, if not on the first page of results, definitely within the top five pages. As we said above, this is not the first time Google has censored us. See: Shocking Censorship at Google News and the Future of Net Neutrality

We will bring up this case and overall censorship issues at the General Assembly meeting tonight when we are back at Liberty Park. We encourage other sites to either link to the report or republish it in full on their site. The most poetic part of this, the last time Google did this the 99% Movement started to take off online because hundreds of other sites helped us out by publishing and linking to the report on their sites. The lesson here for sites like Google, Twitter and Facebook who attempt to censor activism: Your censorship make us stronger!

As our Anonymous brothers and sisters say, “Expect us!”

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http://ampedstatus.org/google-censors-our-occupywallstreet-report/