August 2016

Users view Google Maps more than a billion times each week: It’s one of the world’s largest sources of geographic data and the first place many of us turn when we need to locate something. So it makes sense that, when a Gaza City-based journalism group claimed that the nation of Palestine had literally been wiped from Google’s maps, readers were, well — indignant. Dozens of Middle-Eastern news outlets have covered the “backlash,” and tens of thousands have Facebook-shared and tweeted it. The only problem? Google Maps didn’t delete Palestine on July 25, as claimed. It hasn’t changed its labeling of the region at all. If you search “Palestine” in Google Maps, you’ll get the same result you would have gotten five months ago, when a guy named Zak Martin began a Change.org petition on the subject: The map view defaults to a demarcated, but unlabeled, region stretching from Hebron in the south to Jenin in the north, and from Jerusalem to the Jordanian border.

Even if the current outrage is misplaced, it does raise some interesting questions about the power of mapping technologies like Google’s. In their attempts to dispassionately document the physical world online, tech companies often end up shaping our understanding of it, too. That’s not something that we tend to think about often, but it does become pretty obvious when a map changes/is said to have changed, or when we compare different maps against each other. Some Palestinians have said, for instance, that they’re switching to Microsoft’s Bing Maps, because those do label Palestine as its own discrete place. Apple Maps, meanwhile, neither labels the territory nor differentiates it at all from the Israeli state.