Google implicated in the Orange Revolution?

Posted By Evgeny Morozov Thursday, August 20, 2009 - 1:52 PM Share

I have finally found evidence that the Internet was instrumental in Ukraine's Orange Revolution...Turns out it's all Google's fault!

It turns out that when you use Google Translate to translate (from Chinese to Russian) the expression "Vote for Yanukovych" (Yanukovych was Kremlin's favorite candidate), Google gives you "Vote for Yushenko" in the translated version. Global conspiracy orchestrated by Google!

Even more intriguing is how spotted the error! It was discovered by Liberty.ru, a site closely associated with the Fund for Effective Politics, a leading pro-Kremlin think-tank headed by Gleb Pavlovsky, one of Yanukovich's cheerleaders. I can only imagine how many painfull months (or years?) Pavlovsky's interns must have spent to unearth this tiny piece of evidence suggesting foreign intervention in the Orange Revolution via the Internet!

Update:  Google appears to have fixed this

Update 2:  Here are some screenshots for those who can't believe it! The story is well-covered in Russian and Ukrainian media.

 

NIHTO

6:47 AM ET

August 21, 2009

Suspicious

If you visit the Liberty.ru website, and insert the Chinese text which they provide:
???????
then using google language tools and translating from Chinese to English one gets the same result, "Vote in support of Viktor Yushchenko"

In fact you get the same result if you translate from Chinese into any other language.

Furthermore, typing in "Viktor Yushchenko" into google language tools gives "???" when translating into Chinese(traditional). Note that these are the last three characters which are provided on the Liberty.ru website. The translation of "Yanukovych" into Chinese gives "?????". This looks nothing like what is provided above on the Liberty.ru website.
http://www.liberty.ru/events/Google-golosuet-za-YUschenko

I don't speak Chinese, but this looks suspicious and someone fluent in Chinese should check the character translation.

 

NIHTO

6:49 AM ET

August 21, 2009

Chinese characters

Looks your system doesn't support Chinese characters in comments, so everything written in Chinese above comes out as question marks.

Please check for yourself.

 

Evgeny Morozov, originally from Belarus, is a visiting scholar at Stanford and a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation.

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