The internet is all about the free flow of ideas, right? Collaboration! Discourse! Sharing! The day to day reality of what we do online may not always be quite so idealistic and ideologically motivated, but the open underpinnings are there. Except, of course, when they’re not at all. This visualisation, published by Sebastian Sadowski, uses Google’s transparency data to visualise all the things the company has been asked to censor.
The governments of many countries routinely ask Google to suppress content across sites like Google Search and YouTube. Reasons range from national security, to suicide promotion, and government criticism.
There are also categories for “other” and “reason unspecified.” It’s interesting to see which countries are better or worse than you thought they would be. And check out that little chunk of mint green “reason unspecified” censorship on the US chart. You can get the gist below, but because of the interactivity you really have to explore on visual.ly to see what’s going on. [Digg]
