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Fact check

Is it true: Google Project Dragonfly censored China search engine (2017-19)?

Confirmed5% confidence

Yes — this is confirmed.

Internal Google documents, congressional testimony (Sundar Pichai, December 2018; Karan Bhatia, July 2019), and two employee resignations confirm Project Dragonfly was a real, prototyped censored search engine for China that would have linked queries to phone numbers. Google stated it was 'terminated' only under direct Senate questioning in July 2019, more than a year after The Intercept's disclosure.

The claim

Internal Google project codenamed Dragonfly was built to create a China-compliant censored search engine that would blacklist politically sensitive queries and link search activity to users' phone num

Key evidence

The Intercept disclosure based on leaked internal documents

Karan Bhatia Senate testimony: 'terminated' — July 2019

Read the full evidence file

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