Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Baidu Scores Dismissal of Free Speech Lawsuit

According to The New York Times, Baidua, a popular Chinese search engine, recently scored a simultaneous victory for both censorship of speech and freedom of speech.  A federal district court in New York recently dismissed a lawsuit that sought to punish Baidu for censorship that limits certain pro-democracy search results.  In dismissing the lawsuit, the judge ruled that Baidu itself maintains a First Amendment right to censor pro-democracy webpages from from its own search results. Baidu is the biggest search engine in China with more than 50 percent of the  market share.  However, the Chinese company is required to comply with the nation’s strict regulations over Internet content. As you may recall, in 2010,  Google decided to shutdown its search engine operations in China following ongoing disputes with the nation’s censorship rules. This lawsuit was filed in 2011 and claimed that Baidu was violating United States laws on free speech because its search results had been censoring pro-democracy works for those accessing the site from New York.  The lawsuit sought a mere $16 million in damages for the purported free speech violations.  However, the district court ultimately ruled against the plaintiff and held that requiring Baidu to include pro-democracy webpages in its search results would actually be a violation of the First Amendment Funny how that works, eh? The court compared Baidu’s filtering of search results to a newspaper’s right to exercise “editorial control” over the contents that it publishes. Baidu has simply created a search engine producing results that favor certain types of political speech. The court’s order states that “[t]he First Amendment protects Baidu’s right to advocate for systems of government other than democracy . . . just as surely as it protects Plaintiffs’ rights to advocate for democracy.” 
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