My TakeGoogle’s absurd stance on right to produce wrong anthem results

Let’s do a thought experiment, which I will call: what would Google do? The island of Taiwan has its own “national” anthem, even though it is considered part of China so far as the mainland is concerned. The anthem’s first line is “the three principles of the people”, which was first enunciated by Sun Yat-sen himself, the founder of modern China.

Now, suppose you search on Google “Taiwan’s national anthem” or “the three principles of the people & Taiwan”, and the top results keep yielding the “March of the Volunteers”, which is the national anthem of China, and obviously, also that of Hong Kong.

Do you think the government of Taiwan would complain? Or would it just say, hey, it’s Google’s free speech right, even if the information is wrong?

But what would Google’s response be if Taiwan did complain? It could be, I suppose, like what it told the Hong Kong government after the latter complained that a protest song from the 2019 riots kept coming up in place of the Chinese national anthem.

Perhaps it would respond with the following. “Google handles billions of search queries every day, so we build ranking systems to automatically surface relevant, high quality, and helpful information. We do not manually manipulate organic web listings to determine the ranking of a specific page,” a spokesman said.

“In keeping with our commitment to maximise access to information, we do not remove web results except for specific reasons outlined in our global policy documentation.”