Posted by: Clara Sommier, public policy and government relations analyst

When Walaa posted a picture on social media that spoke out against violence in his hometown of Jairoud, Syria, it earned him three months of violent detention. He fled the country with his family through Turkey and into Greece, where they now live in a refugee camp near the Macedonian border.



Though the Internet played a role in his flight from Syria, connectivity has played a crucial role in helping him rebuild his life in Greece. While living in Greek refugee camps, Walaa used YouTube to learn English, and his language skills are now so good that he’s served as a community advocate and translator. He says he’s far from done: next, he hopes to learn Greek.



As refugees across Europe adapt to new contexts, access to information and education are crucial to help them develop the skills they need. Last fall we encouraged you to donate to a public matching campaign to help refugees access not only basic humanitarian aid, but also resources to create a bridge to their new communities. Since then we’ve helped the International Rescue Committee build an online information hub for refugees, Mercy Corps develop Translation Cards to allow field workers to communicate across languages more easily, partner with NetHope to install low-cost WiFi in refugee camps, and support refugee education through Kiron, a nonprofit providing refugee-tailored university courses available both online and offline.



In addition to Walaa, we’ve heard from other refugees who are finding ways to adjust thanks to Internet and education access. For example, Ahmed is a former Iraqi computer science student now living in Berlin. While waiting for his work permit, he began teaching coding classes at refugee welcome centers as part of Project Reconnect, an initiative we launched with NetHope to equip NGOs with Chromebooks. Kashif, who traveled through seven countries from a small Pakistani town to Berlin, is studying online with Kiron and dreams of working as an engineer at NASA.

Ahmed giving CODE.org classes to young refugees through the Chromebooks in a refugee center in Berlin



On World Refugee Day, we hope you’ll take time to hear stories of more refugees who are working so hard to rebuild their lives.



We also want to thank everyone across the globe who donated last year, and encourage you to continue to support our partners in their critical work. Though the impact of this refugee crisis will be felt for many years to come, we’ll continue to look for ways to contribute.



Posted by Jacquelline Fuller, Director of Google.org https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Ya7jH9LzpcU/V2XHIvzDKQI/AAAAAAAASj8/PHTWtKB8uBAXEUPJpT6f_Q15nSiILL-zQCLcB/s1600/Reconnect_hero.jpg

• Machine Intelligence
• Natural Language Processing & Understanding
• Machine Perception

Succeeding online shouldn’t just be for the privileged few. We want all Europeans to benefit - and digital skills play a big role in this. Today, the European Commission launched its proposals for a new skills agenda and we welcome their plans. Digital skills, one focus area of the plans, make people more employable, are indispensable for many new jobs being created, and fuel economic growth.

At Google, we’re committed to ensuring Europeans have the right skills for this digital age. The process starts with projects like Digital Active in France, aimed at training young people looking for jobs. And we’ve partnered with more than 50 European universities to train students. Our initiatives across 25 European countries result in stories like the Italian Levaggi brothers, who have been making handcrafted chairs for over half a century and increased overseas exports by 30% in major markets after completing our digital skills training.

We’ve made a commitment to train 2 million Europeans in digital skills and are a proud member of the European Commission’s Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs. A rounded education should prepare young people for online life -- it's as essential as literacy and numeracy. And it should be accessible to everyone: we’re particularly pleased that more than 40% of participants in our online workshops so far have been women. And it’s not just for the young - for instance in The Netherlands, of the thousands of people that attended training sessions in Dutch cities, over half are older than 45 years.

We believe all this dovetails with the aims set out by the European Commission. Europe is looking to the future, and good digital skills give people the tools to excel in their jobs, start their own businesses and fully participate in contemporary life.

As emphasized in this recent report by BCG, we need to get better at matching the skills of the workforce with the skills required in new jobs. That is key to making the most out of the digital opportunity. We want to contribute to more stories like the ones above, and are creating various programmes to nurture them. We welcome the Commission's proposals and look forward to working with the next generation of digitally-skilled Europeans.

Lie Junius, Public Policy Director for Google Brussels

In February, we shared the first 128 recipients of the Digital News Initiative Innovation Fund, our €150 million commitment over the next three years to supporting innovation in the European news industry, and we’re excited to see those projects get underway this summer. Today, we’re thrilled to open the Fund for a second round of applications which will be accepted through July 11th.

The goal of the Fund is simple--of ambitious: to spark new thinking, which could come from anywhere in the news ecosystem, to give news organisations - of all sizes - the space to try some new things with no-strings-attached awards.

The Digital News Initiative, which began as a partnership between Google and a small handful of  European news organisations, has grown into an ecosystem of more than 150 now working together to support high quality journalism through technology and innovation, including the open-sourced Accelerated Mobile Pages Project. Today in Germany, France, Russia, Italy and the U.K., the AMP carousel will appear in Google News searches on mobile devices, making the mobile news experience even quicker. The DNI  initiative is open to anyone involved in Europe’s digital news industry, large or small, established or newcomer. We were blown away by the number of applications we received last fall--when more than 1,000 projects from 30 European countries were submitted for review. This season’s application round will be open for the next six weeks, ending 11th July.  Additional details can be found on the DNI Fund website.
Here’s a quick reminder of how the Fund works:
We’re looking for projects that demonstrate new thinking in the practice of digital journalism; that support the development of new business models, or maybe even change the way users consume digital news. Projects can be highly experimental, but must have well-defined goals and have a significant digital component. There is no requirement to use any Google products. Successful projects will show innovation and have a positive impact on the production of original digital journalism and on the future sustainability of the news business.
The Fund is open to established publishers, online-only players, news start-ups, collaborative partnerships and individuals based in the EU and EFTA countries.
Exceptions to the €1 million cap are possible for large projects that are collaborative (e.g., international, sector-wide, involving multiple organisations) or that significantly benefit the broad news ecosystem.
Visit the Digital News Initiative website for full details, including eligibility criteria, terms and conditions, and application forms. Applications must be made in English and the submission deadline for the first round of funding is 11th July 2016.

Initial selection of projects will be done by a Project team, composed of a mix of experienced industry figures and Google staff, who will review all applications for eligibility, innovation and impact. They’ll make recommendations on funding for Prototype and Medium projects to the Fund’s Council, which will have oversight of the Fund’s selection process. The Council will vote on Large projects.

• Joao Palmeiro, President of the Portuguese publishers association and Chair of the DNI Innovation Fund Council

• Alexander Asseily, Founder & CEO of State, Founder of Jawbone
• Arianna Ciccone, Co-Founder and Director of the Perugia International Journalism Festival
• Bartosz Hojka, CEO of Agora S.A.
• Katharina Borchert, Chief Innovation Officer, Mozilla
• Veit Dengler, CEO, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
• Rosalia Lloret, Head of Institutional Relations, Online Publishers’ Association Europe
• Bruno Patino, Dean of Sciences-Po Journalism School
• Murdoch MacLennan, CEO of the Telegraph Media Group
• Madhav Chinnappa, Head of Strategic Relations, News and Publishers, Google
• Torsten Schuppe, Director of Marketing EMEA, Google
• Ronan Harris, Vice President, Google

We will announce the next recipients of these awards before the winter holidays. We look forward to receiving your applications!
Posted by Ludovic Blecher on behalf of the DNI Fund Team

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