Putting torture on the President's map in Tunisia
Five years ago, if you searched for 'miserable failure' on Google, the first results would lead you to webpages about George Bush. This kind of manipulation of Google's search algorithms, causing a certain search phrase to point to an unexpected page, is known as 'Google bombing'. It has been used since 2000 for pranks and general internet tomfoolery, but also more seriously by activists looking to draw attention to rights issues.
In 2007 in Tunisia, activists used a version of this technique to both publicly poke fun at the government as well as creatively circumvent government censorship.
The Tunisian government controls the gateway for all the country’s Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and as such is able to pervasively censor online content using filtering software loaded onto its servers. Not only is it able to censor, however, but it is also able to conceal this process from internet users by replacing the 403 'Forbidden' error message – usually shown when a site is blocked -- with a 404 'File Not Found' message, which gives no indication of government censorship.
In 2007 the Tunisian government blocked access to video sharing websites Youtube and Dailymotion.
Activists from Tunisian independent collective of bloggers Nawaat.org took this as a challenge and started embedding videos on Google Earth in locations around Tunisia -- most notably, the Carthage Presidential Palace. Whoever viewed Tunisia on Google Earth could then also have instant access to videos of human rights abuses and torture that had been documented in the country.
Nawaat managed to do this by simply geo-tagging each video as it was uploaded to YouTube. Once the YouTube layer in Google Earth was activated, all the geo-tagged videos could be seen. Most videos were plotted on the presidential palace, thereby partially covering the view of it on Google Earth.
This achieved two things: it allowed the videos blocked on Youtube to be visible through another means, and it also allowed users searching Google Earth to see the juxtaposition of Tunisia's tourist attractions with the stark reality of human rights abuse.
In cases where censorship is not a hurdle for activists, Google bombing is still a useful way to make a political point. In 2003, for example, Anthony Cox used this tactic to create a joke about the Bush administration's (increasingly obvious) false claim that there were 'weapons of mass destruction' in Iraq. Cox designed a simple webpage to look exactly like the 404 error page; instead it read 'These Weapons of Mass Destruction cannot be displayed', and offered a series of solutions – involving the UN Security Council, the League of Nations and US foreign policy – to finding them. Within a month Cox's page had been viewed 1 million times and, due to the number of fans who placed links to it on their websites, was quickly pushed near the top of Google's search results for the term 'Iraq war'.
There are plenty of examples of politically-inspired Google Bombs from all over the world – see the Wikipedia entry for a thorough list.
FURTHER READING
The war on the web, by Anthony Cox in The Guardian, 2003.
Interface as a conflict of ideologies, Mushon.com, 2007.
Google Earth bombing for a free Tunisia, Nawaat, 2008.
Geobombing Guide, Global Voices.
Human rights videos besiege the Tunisian presidential palace, Global Voices Advocacy, 2008.
