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Jeremy Hunt takes aim at Google over ‘child abuse content’

UK foreign minister Jeremy Hunt has lashed out at Google over its plans to build a censored version of its search engine in China, while lagging on efforts to remove sensitive content on child abuse.

"Seems extraordinary that Google is considering censoring its content to get into China but won’t cooperate with UK, US and other Five Eyes countries in removing child abuse content," Hunt tweeted this morning.

"They used to be so proud of being values-driven…"

A spokesperson for Google denied the firm has failed to cooperate with governments, saying:

We agree with Jeremy Hunt that child sexual abuse is abhorrent and must be removed, that’s why we co-operate with governments to fight child sexual abuse online and why we offered to send a Google policy expert to the Five Eyes conference.

Partnership is very important to fighting this problem and so we also work closely with other tech companies, the Internet Watch Foundation and NCMEC to keep child sexual abuse imagery off the web.

It was reported earlier this month that Google is working on a censored search engine in China under the codename Project Dragonfly.

Read more: Google is reportedly building a censored search engine in China

Search results on the site will not include links to sites that focus on topics considered troublesome by the Chinese government, including entire websites such as BBC News and Wikipedia.

The news was followed by a widespread backlash from Google's own employees, with about 1,400 signing a letter to executives demanding transparency on the project.

Known as "The Great Firewall of China", Google used to operate a censored version of its main site in China until March 2010.

Read more: Trump doubles down on bias accusations against US tech giants

This comes as Google remains under fire from US President Donald Trump, over what he alleges to be a censored version of its search results that prioritises negative news stories from "leftwing media" sources.