Apparently, Google News is beginning to reexamine the procedures that permitted including vile Nazi sites like National Vanguard: Google Axes Hate News. No word from them on what those procedures might be.

Google has to draw the line somewhere in its mission to make all the world’s information available online. It’s starting with hate speech.

internetnews.com has learned that Google is in the process of removing National Vanguard content from its Google News service. National Vanguard is a publication of the National Alliance, which describes itself as an “organization for people of European descent.”

Earlier today, germany.internet.com reported that Google Germany would remove National Zeitung, a neo-Fascist newspaper, from its own news index.

“Google News does not allow hate content,” said Google spokesman Steve Langdon. “If we are made aware of articles that contain hate content, we will remove them.”

Langdon said news media must apply to be included in Google News and that they are evaluated by editors before inclusion. He wouldn’t provide a list of news media that Google News indexes, nor would he give details of the evaluation process or criteria for inclusion.

And in fact, National Vanguard has been removed from the Google News index as I write this.

But here’s a pertinent question: what does Google mean by “hate content,” and who decides?

Does Jihad Unspun (the radical Islamist equivalent of a white supremacist hate group) qualify? Honest Reporting certainly thinks so: Nazism in the News.

UPDATE at 3/23/05 6:34:45 pm:

Because many people are unclear about this (including, apparently, the author of the piece above), please note: this exclusion applies only to Google News, the division of Google which compiles headlines from “legitimate” news sources that pass Google’s review procedures (whatever they are). It does not apply to the Google search engine, which still indexes sites like National Vanguard. (As it should. We need to be aware of them.)