Microsoft, Gooogle, and Yahoo will begin to block ads and information about sex determination in their online search engines in India as a result of a supreme court judgment in India.
India has a history with sex determination in families, culminating in a ban on sex determination due to an alarming rate of female foeticides where families would attempt to have male children and deliberately abort female children in an attempt to carry out this objective.
As a result of this, India banned pre-birth sex determiantion in an attempt to curb the scourge, but a course case this year alleged that Microsoft,Yahoo, and Google were complicit in enabling providers of Sex determination services to reach users who wanted them by way of ads, as well as providing information about the practice online.
As stated above, the Supreme Court of India ruled against them and demanded they prevent ads from showing up in search results, leading to the search firms identifying up to 22 keywords that are commonly used to search for sex determination in India.
All results which provide information around pre-natal determination in India will now be blocked and anyone searching for those keywords will be unable to find information about their search of choice.
This isn’t the first time search engines are redirecting people to search dangerous terms to less harmful ones, Google has been spotted redirecting people who search for information about ISIS and terrorist activities to less harmful results. The internet and search engines are very powerful tools, and as such, the creators that run them are responsible for how that power is used.