In the offline world, it’s usually clear what is acceptable behaviour and what is not. Those boundaries are just as important online, which is why today, together with the European Commission, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter we signed a Code of Conduct which will help combat the spread of illegal hate speech online in Europe.

We’re committed to tackling this important issue. We have always prohibited illegal hate speech on our platforms, and we have Community Guidelines that set the rules of the road on YouTube, including prohibitions on hate speech, terrorist recruitment and incitement to violence.

European Justice Commissioner Vĕra Jourová (centre), signed the Code of Conduct, as did representatives from (l to r) Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft and Google


We’ve built efficient systems to review the majority of valid notifications in less than 24 hours, and to remove illegal content. We also cooperate with legal process so that governments are able to do their investigatory work and request removal of information that may violate local law. Beyond review processes, we also support NGOs working on counterspeech initiatives.

We welcome the Commission’s commitment to developing self-regulatory approaches to fighting hate speech online. We look forward to working with them and civil society groups to fight illegal content online, improve the experience online for our users, and ensure that there is no space on our platforms for hateful content.

Posted by Lie Junius, Public Policy Director, Google Brussels

Today, we published an op-ed by Kent Walker, Google’s global general counsel, in France’s Le Monde newspaper.  We’re republishing the op-ed in English below. For hundreds of years, it has been an accepted rule of law that one country should not have the right to impose its rules on the citizens of other countries. As a result, information that is illegal in one country can be perfectly legal in others: Thailand outlaws insults to its king; Brazil outlaws negative campaigning in political elections; Turkey outlaws speech that denigrates Ataturk or the Turkish nation — but each of these things is legal elsewhere.  As a company that operates globally, we work hard to respect these differences. In March, the French data protection regulator (the CNIL) ordered that its interpretation of French law protecting the right to be forgotten should apply not just in France, but in every country in the world.   The right to be forgotten - more accurately, a right to be delisted from search results - was created in a landmark 2014 ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). It lets Europeans delist certain links from search engine results generated by searches for their name, even when those links point to truthful and lawfully published information like newspaper articles or official government websites. Google complies with the European Court’s ruling in every country in the EU. Our approach reflects the criteria set out by the CJEU, as well as guidance from each country’s regulators and courts about the nuances of their local data protection rules. Across Europe we’ve now reviewed nearly 1.5 million webpages, delisting around 40%. In France alone, we’ve reviewed over 300,000 webpages, delisting nearly 50%. Following feedback from European regulators, we recently expanded our approach, restricting access to delisted links on all Google Search services viewed from the country of the person making the request.  (We also remove the link from results on other EU country domains.) That means that if we detect you’re in France, and you search for someone who had a link delisted under the right to be forgotten, you won’t see that link anywhere on Google Search - regardless of which domain you use.  Anyone outside the EU will continue see the link appear on non-European domains in response to the same search query. The CNIL's latest order, however, requires us to go even further, applying the CNIL’s interpretation of French law to every version of Google Search globally. This would mean removing links to content - which may be perfectly legal locally - from Australia (google.com.au) to Zambia (google.co.zm) and everywhere in between, including google.com. As a matter of both law and principle, we disagree with this demand. We comply with the laws of the countries in which we operate. But if French law applies globally, how long will it be until other countries - perhaps less open and democratic - start demanding that their laws regulating information likewise have global reach?  This order could lead to a global race to the bottom, harming access to information that is perfectly lawful to view in one’s own country. For example, this could prevent French citizens from seeing content that is perfectly legal in France. This is not just a hypothetical concern. We have received demands from governments to remove content globally on various grounds -- and we have resisted, even if that has sometimes led to the blocking of our services. In defence of this foundational principle of international law, we today filed our appeal of the CNIL’s order with France’s Supreme Administrative Court, the Conseil d’Etat. We look forward to the Court’s review of this case, which we hope will maintain the rights of citizens around the world to access legal information.

Posted by Kent Walker, Senior Vice President and General Counsel

Do you wake up in the morning wondering what your dreams mean? The idea that dreams ‘mean’ anything, or that we have an unconscious mind at all, is now commonly accepted thanks to Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the father of psychoanalysis. To celebrate the 160th anniversary of his birth today, we have partnered with the Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna and the Freud Museum London to bring the stories behind Freud’s life and legacy online. We commemorate Sigmund Freud with a Google Doodle on our homepages in 40 countries.

The Sigmund Freud Museum in Vienna is located in the physician’s former apartment and office located in the city’s ninth district. He lived and worked there from 1891 until 1938, when his family fled Nazi persecution. The online exhibition Getting to know Sigmund Freud, presents several stages of his life through a selection of photographs, illustrations and documents. The Freud Museum London is located in the house where the Freud family lived after their escape from Austria. The museum’s online exhibition “Sigmund Freud: A Life in Psychoanalysis” brings Sigmund Freud to life and shows how he was one of the most influential thinkers and cultural personalities of the 20th century. The exhibit introduces psychoanalysis in an accessible way, show us how Freud’s ‘talking cure’  helped treat psychological issues, and even allows us to peek inside Freud’s home with the famous couch his patients opened up their thoughts.   

Freud's psychoanalytic couch (2015) by photographer: Ardon Bar Hama, Freud Museum London

The Google Doodle that honors Freud’s work doesn’t focus on the more familiar symbol of the psychoanalyst’s couch. Instead, Kevin Laughlin, who created this Google Doodle, visualises Freud’s theory of the mind. The hidden portion of the icebergs suggest the vast, murky underside of the unconscious human mind. Like the steam ship, Freud’s psychoanalysis helps us to navigate these fascinating depths. Sigmund Freud steered a path through 20th-century thought, leaving all of us in the wake of his remarkable legacy.
Posted by Lauren Nemroff, program manager, Google Cultural Institute

The online world is at its best when it includes everyone. Currently, three billion of the world's seven billion people are connected to the internet; by 2020 it'll be five billion. If women aren't included as equal partners in this internet revolution, we all stand to lose. That's why this week, we teamed up with Debating Europe to host a Women & Tech event in Brussels with EU Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality Věra Jourová, Google Europe’s President Matt Brittin, and wired women from around the world to highlight the impact of tech on women and of women on tech.

Women are still vastly underrepresented in the tech sector. We only make up only 30% of the workforce in the ICT sector, and 19% of digital entrepreneurs -- compared to over 30% in other sectors. This disparity begins in education, where we have a lower participation rate worldwide in science, technology maths and engineering subjects.

Jourová set the tone, noting that we shouldn’t just talk about change, but make it happen. She told us about the vital work the European Commission is doing in this area, for instance by contributing to the Girls in ICT project. But there’s still a lot of work on the same basic point: we need to increase the number of women working in tech.

To solve a problem, you need data. Google's aim is to organise the world's information, and one of our speakers, Lucy Hurst, had plenty to share. She co-authored The Economist Intelligence Unit's report on the gender gap, which showed that in some countries inequality between men and women is getting worse.

Next, you need enthusiasm, and a will to change. One of the most inspiring speakers we heard from was Hayla Ghazal -- a Dubai-based YouTube star who was recently made a UN Change Ambassador. She mentioned that in one of her videos -- which offer a light-hearted look at everything from pre-exam panic to satirical differences between Arab and Western mothers -- she talked about her love of reading. Soon after, parents were thanking her for encouraging their daughters to read.

She also told us about the importance of having a diverse range of female role models worldwide; about how women can discover economic and educational opportunities online; and that everyone benefits when women around the world are connected, educated, and able to use their capabilities to the full.

From Google, we invited Yvonne Agyei, our Vice President of People Operations.We know the most exciting ideas come from unexplored places: that's why with hiring, we extend our reach beyond traditional universities, helping us discover the talent of underrepresented groups, including women. We also invest in partnerships across the continent to get young people excited about computer science, like Lero’s Summer Computing Camp for Girls in Ireland.

We’re pleased with the results, even though there’s clearly more to do. So far, 37% of Campus London community members are female, and 33% of our Madrid members are female. Our Campus Directors in London and Madrid - Sarah Drinkwater and Sofia Benjumea - are doing an amazing job in supporting greater diversity in local start-up communities. Of all the startups that make up our Campus community, 40% have a woman in the ‘founder’ team.

All of this fits in with our wider goal of training 2 million Europeans in digital skills -- in fact, 43% of participants in our digital workshops, so far, are women. They include Romanian folk blouse retailers and a cat grooming service in The Netherlands.

There's a lot to be optimistic about, but there's a great deal of work to be done as well. Great companies rely on great people -- and if women aren’t included, half the talent pool is absent. We want more stories like Mame Khary Diene, and her start-up BioEssence, more YouTubers like Hayla and her friends sharing their excitement about gender equality, and more coding workshops for girls like the ones run by Cheryl D. Miller of the Digital Leadership Institute. We look forward to training hundreds of thousands of girls and women in digital skills over the next few years.

Posted by: Sara Elnusairi, Public Affairs Manager Google Brussels