Public Please

According to the New York Times’s “Health Database Was Set Up To Ignore ‘Abortion‘”, managers of PopLine, a federally funded reproductive health database at Johns Hopkins University, removed the word “abortion” from the list of potential search terms. The article reports that the dean of the school, Dr. Michael Klag reversed the restriction after he learned about it, and that he would investigate the incident.

When designing a web-based interface for a database, one can create a list of words called stop-words, which will not be included as search terms. Stop-words are often used to filter out vulgar language, such as curse words. Apparently, a similar filtering mechanism was applied to the word ‘abortion’.

Every form of censorship is a political issue, some more controversial than others. With database censorship, users are allowed to freely express their search terms, but the search results will be filtered to remove censored information. Instead of the sender being censored, the replier is censored.

What are some other recent examples of database censorship?