The European Commission has sent Google a request to remove Russian state media search results in EU countries. As reported by the Washington Post, Google shared a letter from EU officials in a government inquiry database. In it, officials explain how the Commission’s official order to ban the broadcast of RT is Sputnik in the European Union it also applies to search engines and Internet companies in general.
Google: Search results removed for Russian state media?
You will recall that the commission issued a ban on the Russian state media a few days after the invasion of Ukraine began. Ursula von der Leyen President of the European Commission, said that by doing so the aforementioned media “will no longer be able to spread their lies to justify Putin’s war”. While it wasn’t entirely clear how the order applied to internet companies, Facebook, Twitter e TikTok they promptly restricted access to RT and Sputnik across Europe.
Google has also announced its restrictions, but up until now they have always been channel-only YouTube. In the letter that Google He shared, officials explained that search engines play an important role in disseminating content and that if the company did not restrict access to Russian media, it would facilitate public access to it.
“The activity of search engines plays a decisive role in the overall dissemination of content as it makes the latter accessible to any Internet user who performs a search on the basis of the indication of the content or related terms, even to Internet users who otherwise they would not have found the web page on which that content is published. Consequently, if search engines like Google did not remove RT and Sputnik, they would facilitate public access to the content of RT and Sputnik, or contribute to such access ”.
Google has not yet announced whether or not it will comply with this request.