Google blacks out story on 9/11?
Published on March 26th, 2006 • 
It seems that Google is trying to black out a story posted on the website 9/11 Eyewitness, about New York Times 9/11 Censorship. You can view the stories in the Google Cache here. Notice that two of the stories on that page are blacked out. You can read the blacked out stories here and here.
When you read the first story, the need for blacking it out becomes clear:
Is the American Press still Free?
This was the title of a controversial presentation at a prestigious press club in Tokyo, Japan, Tuesday, March 14. The New York Times Tokyo Bureau Chief, Jim Brooks, said that he couldn’t attend an official press function about 9/11 or he would be fired. Coincidentally, the Reuters Bureau chief, Daniel Sloan, was also a strong opponent to the event being held, but he and Brooks were voted down by international members and the event was able to go ahead.
Webmaster and creator of the 9/11 Eyewitness video, Rick Siegel, posted more on this here, including a screenshot of the Google cache.
As Siegel notes, it is very strange that two of the cells on that page are blacked out. His site is database driven with an automatic CMS, and they don’t do any HTML coding by hand, so it is very strange that only two of the cells are blacked out. He adds that obviously it had to be done by hand.
A quick look at the HTML reveals that in the code, a “< /table>” tag has been replaced by “< /ta< /b>ble& gt;” which causes one of the tables not to close, and causing that table to take the background color of the previous table, which is black, thus blacking out the story.
If this is by accident, it is a very strange bug in Google’s software since it only happened with the top two stories, which perhaps by chance (?) are also the most controversial. I wonder what Google has to say about this?
This entry was posted on Sunday, March 26th, 2006 at 12:11 pm by Karel Donk
and is filed under Information Technology, Politics, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the 
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2 Responses to “Google blacks out story on 9/11?”
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April 12th, 2006 at 7:30 am
I also agree that it could not have been done by a script, or else it would have blacked out all the stories. Otherwise it has got to be a really weird bug in the script to just black out the first 2 stories. It’s a little suspicious.
You should hold on to the original files as you can clearly see in the code what the problem is. I guess you could also post them allong with the screenshot in case people would want to see for themselves.
Also, I don’t like any form of censoring. Google have done it already in the China case I mention elsewhere on my blog. It’s a serious problem.
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Google has fixed their cache, but updated it instead. The original cache would have always kept that blacked out one, now it is a newer one.
I saved the original files in a file save. Do you think it would be better to post them instead of the screen capture?
Experts agree the phrasing of the cache could cause the issue, but when you see what it was, the corrupted tag, then you have to wonder why the script only did it to the top 2 stories, those what would be in the view, those that were pretty damning. A script would have continued to error into each table (there were 10 news stories on that page).
Thanks for taking this as serious as it is.