Search for 'anti national', 'sedition' and Google Maps takes you to JNU

Google Maps, which in the past has been attacked with several bogus edits, appears to have been marred again by another embarrassing incident.

The latest goof in Google Maps comes in the wake of the recent Jawharlal Nehru University (JNU) controversy that led to the arrest of JNU Students' Union President Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid, and Anirban Bhattacharya, on charges of sedition and criminal conspiracy.

Type in words like "anti national", "sedition" or "leftist" in Google Maps, and it will take you to Jawharlal Nehru University. While there could be more keywords redirecting you to the same location, but we, so far, have been able to verify only these three apart from the legitimate ones.

While in the past many such incidents where Google provided users with botched up results appeared to have occurred because of the phoney edits suggested by users via the company's crowd-sourced map making tool, the latest incident doesn't seem to have been caused because that.

It, in fact, seems to have happened because of the frequent use of terms like "anti national" and "leftist" in reviews of the JNU location on Google Maps along with numerous news stories around the recent incidents at the university that had mention of these terms.

This is more so because similar suggestions made by users via map making tools are still pending and remain unpublished. Go to Map Maker and search Jawaharlal Nehru University. Under details you will find that users have made requests to make the university searchable by terms like "Anti national", "Jihadi University," and "Psychiatric Hospital" - but all of them are still listed as Pending.

Last year in May, Google, with the aim to prevent fake edits, had made its Map Maker service temporarily unavailable. The move had been made after the embarrassing incident wherein the Maps showed an image of an Android mascot urinating on an Apple logo. The image appeared briefly at a Pakistani location before it was removed.

Before that in April, someone had revised the map of the White House in Washington to include a new business called "Edwards Snow Den," an apparent effort to draw attention to former national security contractor Edward Snowden, who had leaked a trove of secret documents on US surveillance.

Google lets people modify maps in the spirit of tapping into intimate, local knowledge to make them more accurate and detailed, but the service is sporadically abused by some mischievous users.

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