'Let's deal with it in a legal way,' says HK tech chief over the banning of protest song

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Hong Kong's innovation and tech chief said the removal of protest song "Glory to Hong Kong" on Google's anthem search results has to be dealt with "in a legal way", as tech giant Google requires proven evidence that the song itself is against the local law.

Sun Dong, secretary for innovation, technology and industry said in a TV interview on Saturday, that Google would only manually remove the protest song from the search results if the government has enough evidence to prove that the song is against law and if a court injunction is in place to ban the playing of the song.

“Alright. If you say it is a legal issue, then we are dealing with it the legal way,” Sun said. “We hoped to put our correct national anthem on the top of the search results, and Google had strong opposition to our suggestion. They mentioned a lot of technical reasons, and we responded in a technical way as well."

Don't miss: HK sports federation urges government to push Google again over another anthem blunder

Most recently, the government applied to ban “unlawful acts” relating to the protest song, its melody, lyrics and all derivations. This comes after a song related to the 2019 protest in Hong Kong was played during multiple international sports events over the past year, which include an international ice hockey competition in Bosnia in late February this year.

Back in March this year, Sports Federation and Olympic Committee (SF&OC) honorary vice chairman Pui Kwan Kay has urged the government to push Google in ensuring the correct Chinese national anthem appears as the top search result for certain keywords, following Google's defense in December last year.

In a conversation with MARKETING-INTERACTIVE previously, a Google spokesperson said: "Google handles billions of search queries every day, so we build ranking systems to automatically surface relevant, high quality, and helpful information. We do not manually manipulate organic web listings to determine the ranking of a specific page."

Photo courtesy: RTHK

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