The Danish Union of Journalists (DJ) website is no longer visible from Google’s search results for 1% of Danish users as part of a “time-limited test” by Google. The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) urges Google to reconsider this “experiment” and restores the visibility of DJ’s and Danish news websites in its search results.
The experiment was announced on 14 November and consists of hiding traditional news websites from 1% of users in 8 countries: Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Denmark, Greece, Croatia, Poland and Spain. While a French court ruled the experiment illegal after a complaint from the French Union of Magazine Press Editors (SEPM), the test is still ongoing in the other countries.
Google did not specify when it would begin, how long it would last, or what users would be targeted. The firm launched this project after European publishers demanded more information about the traffic brought to their websites by Google search as part of the implementation of the EU Copyright Directive.
The EFJ and the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations (IFRRO) already denounced this decision in a letter to Google, expressing concerns about the infringement of the right of free access to news content online guaranteed by the EU Copyright Directive.
One month after the beginning of the experiment, the Danish news website Journalisten.dk published an article explaining that the Danish Union of Journalists (DJ) website was also deindexed on Google. In the article, a TV Midtvest journalist explains that, upon researching collective agreements contracted between the DJ and Danish media outlets and publishers, he realised that the DJ website was also nowhere to be found in the search results.
“This attempt is totally unprecedented. And the fact that a union’s website is hidden from its own members in Google searches only underlines the extent of Google’s power over our infrastructure”, explains DJ Vice President Allan Boye Thustrup to journalisten.dk. “We are not a media outlet, and that creates uncertainty about the very basis of the experience,” he added.
The web giant declared that there is an ongoing investigation on the reasons why DJ is also hidden in Google search results.
EFJ General Secretary Ricardo Gutiérrez said: “Google should answer to news publishers’ request for more transparency when it comes to the way they manage their search engine, especially in today’s context of rising disinformation, rather than prevent access to news website. We demand explanations as to how and why a union was concerned by their questionable experiment.”
Source: EFJ
