Iran upset at google video description

Iran is upset over a google video description stating the Iranian city of Tabriz is in Azerbaijan when in actuality Tabriz is the Azeri provincial capital in Iran. Yesterday the description read, "This video shows Tabriz, a city in Southern Azerbaijan, currently in the territory of Iran." Today the description has been slightly altered: "This video shows Tabriz, a major Azerbaijani city, in East Azerbaijan (Iran)."

Iranian government officials are urging people to flood google with complaint emails over the situation, an "insult" they say undermines Iran's territorial integrity.

Apparently this story has spawned a spoof of the same video with an even more dubious description: " Tabriz is the capital city of South Azerbaijan which is currently occupied by barbarian persians (Iranians). South Azerbaijan includes the ... all northwest ... all » provinces of a fake country called Iran"

As you may well know, google does not write the descriptions for the videos it hosts, as Tech and Science News Updates says:

Google has absolutely nothing to do with this, other than being the platform on which the video is hosted. They didn’t write the description. They didn’t approve the description. Frankly, it seems likely that they couldn’t care any less about the description. However, it doesn’t seem like the Iranian officials understand that at all, suggesting that this is a case of Google’s “interference in the affairs of another country,” while a newspaper claims that this is a “dubious” act by Google. Perhaps before they bash Google so hard they should actually understand how the system works and that Google has absolutely nothing to do with the content or description of the video. Of course, that’s not nearly as simple as just blaming Google.

-Dippold

Political Online Reputation