Google's Blogger Follows Twitter In Country-By-Country Censorship

Last month, Twitter decided to refine its rules on what users can and cannot post. Instead of creating one massive set of rules that incorporated every single country's individual laws on what kind of content is legal, it decided to restrict content on a regional basis. Now, Google has followed in those footsteps with its blogging software Blogger. The search giant will begin by redirecting Blogger domain accounts to specific country domains based on user location.

From there, it will be easy to implement country-specific rules and regulations. This means, for example, someone in the US who posts pro-Nazi content on their Blogger blog will be perfectly in his legal rights to do so, but someone in Germany, where the exact same content would be illegal, will be censored. For Blogger, this process will be implemented over the next several months.

While this doesn't mean Google can automatically weed out content that local governments deem illegal, it does mean that if a local government asks Google to take down a post, the search giant will have the ability to take it down only to users within that country. The idea is to promote free speech as much as possible without entirely blocking access to some countries or restricting posting guidelines to the entire world.

[via PC Mag]