Alphabet isn't the result of a merger, or Google getting bought out by a different company. It's largely the same people and culture that Google was and is, just split out into a larger parent organization so they can oversee more products.
If I change my name to Eric, that doesn't make me a different person.
I think proactive censorship for authoritarian governments (e.g., China) falls into this category.
Google is missing out on the soon-to-be biggest ad market of the world - at least partially due to ethical standards. Apple does earn a significant part of its revenues in China and has no problems with working with the govt there.
(I am not affiliated in any way with either company - just don't understand all the hate against Google)
So the relevant product groups and leadership are, at least to some degree, implicated in deciding to go along with rules they knew would be morally objectionable from the start.
That said, Chinese folks are imo quite right to cry "hypocrisy" on the degree of moral outrage US citizens level at Western nations given how many ways western nations police dissidents and stifle anti-government speech.
If not, the clearly the principle isn't so solid after all. But I don't know what to replace it with.
(I've removed contextual text that I think is irrelevant for this discussion.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11504953
... Civil disobedience is the refusal to obey laws, not the refusal to uphold them. People participating in civil disobedience do it with the understanding that they can (and should) be prosecuted for such. They do so to act as martyrs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11506428
...
The bottom line is, you need to be really, really careful when you start arguing for "ethics" and "morality" as a basis for execution of law. For instance, to make a concrete example: It could be argued that based on the ethics and morality of the Nazis, that the mass murders committed under the Holocaust were in fact them morally disobeying those supra-national human rights laws. Who are you to say that the Nazi morality is wrong? You can't point to the agreed-upon supra-national human rights laws, because you are in fact arguing that law should be violated based on morality!
In fact, one of the ways to view law is as an encoding of the morality of the society it covers. Sometimes laws, being fixed entities, and society, being ever changing, drift apart over time. Same as software drifts from the requirements of business if not kept up to date. It usually takes an example like this German one to point out the absurdity, and if the law really is no longer part of the society's morality, becomes fairly easy for lawmakers to fix. (As a reminder, this law being invoked is very old -- from when Germany was a monarchy and insulting dictator kings was morally a very serious crime!)
That is a valid conflation. Google became Alphabet in 2015. It began in 1998. The vast majority of its existence and brand persona is as Google.
The Web Spam team at Google is corrupt, such that a single person can affect rankings in ways that destroy or legitimize websites. And they do fully take advantage of this power.
It’s literally impossible to say that Google doesn’t control or limit what people think, given that there’s zero transparency and zero accountability.
(It’s too late for me to edit my comment.)
Advertisement is precisely trying to control what people think. Specifically, influence their economic and political decisions.
Google's efforts against "fake news" are exactly trying to do that.
And just because one agrees with them in this one instance doesn't change the precedent.
> anything and everything that google does or doesn’t do would be considered an effort to change beliefs
Absolutely. Google (like so many other organizations) is making efforts to change beliefs all the time. That's not a problem per se, except they have so much leverage to _succeed_ at it that it might be worth thinking about the implications a bit. And statements that they don't do it don't help with that step.
Did you mean proliferation? (just trying to avoid falsehoods on HN)
But I also understand why news media in a totalitarian regime toe the party line, say. And they are also damned if they do, damned if they don't.
Again, I am not claiming that Google should be doing something different. They may well not have any other options. I'm claiming that we should be aware of what they (and various other companies and governments!) are doing and act accordingly. If someone claimed that the US government "isn't trying to control or limit what people think", say, that would probably be met with a healthy dose of skepticism. Even more so for the Chinese government. My argument is that such claims about Google should also be treated sceptically. Not as sceptically as the Chinese government; hard to compare tothe US government.
Do you see the juxtaposition here?
Honestly, I don't think society as a whole has really come to grips with what advertising is or how to treat it ethically. Informing consumers has never really been what it's used for, even though that's a critical function of any proposed society that relies on open markets.
And how does that apply in this context? Are you conflating Google and their parent: Alphabet?
Also, comparing Google to Big Brother is disingenuous at best. Google isn't trying to control or limit what people think. They are merely trying to allow advertisers to target audiences precisely.
I hate advertising, for sure. But the anti-Google fear-mongering and hate based on nothing substantial and leveraging an inaccurate view of what Google does is harmful for everyone involved.