Here are some other factors to consider:
- Does it soil our hands to build the "Mental handcuffs" of China, even if Baidu started it?
- Does it stop at China? Or what about Turkey? Iran? Would we build a search in Saudi Arabia that didn't let women look up divorce if the government wanted it?
- Does it come to America? What about searches that seem criminal?
This disagreement is much more fundamental than China. It's about the role of free-information and free-education being the basis upon which beliefs should be formed, rather than beliefs being used to block out free-information.
Those are differences in kind, not just degree.
Comments like this make me glad I live in the USA. We don't discriminate on what types of censorship are acceptable or not. Less extraordinary exceptions (Child pornography, Libel), any censorship is in violation of our constitution and most closely held core values.
It doesn't matter what the Chinese government says, because if they say something like that they're lying. Their censorship is meant to protect the power and privilege of the already powerful and privileged, and keep everyone else complaint to them.
The only way Chinese censorship "protects" individuals is by discouraging them from having dissident thoughts that the government may decided to personally and physically oppress them for having.
Nazism is despicable, but censoring the Nazi voice is effectively the same as preventing citizens from having those "dissident thoughts" that contradict modern western government, and you actually can receive prison time for expressing Nazi sentiments in Germany so the government absolutely does "oppress them" for having those thoughts.
China views western influence the same way. In China's history, rule by the west has seen terrorism, imperialism, and corruption, which have lasted far longer (since the 1800s when the First Opium Wars were fought), and I would argue have led to greater suffering (certainly the numbers are in favor of this being the case).
Accepting government censorship in the EU is, in principle, no different from censorship in China. The only difference is the flavor.
For the record, I support neither.
>I'm sure the Chinese would say exactly the same thing that the EU does about their system; it "protects" individuals from what they don't need to know.
I'm sure they would. I'm also sure that Donald Trump would say that he's not a liar. That doesn't mean it's an argument we need to take seriously. You can make judgments for yourself - I believe that the EU leadership is more or less acting in good faith (and is likely to continue doing so), and the CCP is not. That's a meaningful difference.
If censorship existed in the USA, Google would have still started under it, and simply operated with that constraint. This is no different than operating in China.
Google can't influence one way or another what censorship laws exist in China, currently. If they had a significant market share there, then they might be able to negotiate terms, since they would have some leverage.
>If censorship existed in the USA, Google would have still started under it, and simply operated with that constraint.
"If the US were just like China, we'd be in no position to criticize them" - sure, but it isn't. The USA and the PRC are not the same, and I don't think it's a relevant hypothetical.
I seem to recall that anything about Nazis is censored in France. I believe selling Nazi stuff on eBay is forbidden, for example.
But I haven't heard about this in a long time, so this may not still be true.
China wants to censor its own human rights violations, I think there morally bad. Certain EU Nations want to prevent fat right nationalist radicalization via censorship. I think that's clumsy, but good.
So hence "why single out China." It stops whenever the employees put up a fight. Isn't that the point of integrating a company-wide value system? You want to mimic an individual value system, in that you are clear on why you made certain decisions, because you can point to your value system?
But, who will be deciding what is considered as ultra-nationalist? Some liberal government that might be overly corrupt and is about to lose the election could just label their political opponents as modern day Nazis and have them be censored on Google search. For example Germany treats the AfD as a far-right party, but in other countries they would be centrist at best. There is no middle ground, because morals wary from individual, we might try a consensus, but that would destroy individual rights. To me it seems that it's best to have a censor-free search engine, perhaps only censor stuff that is related to illegal activities or terrorism, but make everything else be publicly available.
Presumably legislatures, that are elected? I'm not sure how it works over there.
>Some liberal government that might be overly corrupt and is about to lose the election could just label their political opponents as modern day Nazis and have them be censored on Google search.
Well, that's happening in America right now, the executive branch is labeling his opponent political party as Communists, don't respect rule of law, saying they want Open Borders or to "Take the Guns Away!" despite the fact that this is factually incorrect. In the USA, we have several branches of government that helps balance when this happens - for example, our judicial branch recently restored the press pass of a journalist removed for being a thorn in the executive's side. I imagine a balance is similarly struck in these European nations? They are all democracies, right?
It seems very much an age of free flow information and rule of the people. Despite the warning-flag-waving of the alt-right in the USA that labeling people nazis will somehow cause totalitarian liberal rule, it really seems like the opposite is happening - far-right nationalism seems to be on the attack for totalitarianism, with the democratic systems keeping it at bay.
I am very interested in discussing this further, however, because I don't believe it's a simple, black and white issue, and I am curious if there's ways to prevent bad things like far-right nationalism without restricting speech (which, the argument goes, could backfire).
Democrat Rep Eric Swalwell advocates for a complete gun ban: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/this-democratic-c...
So, your claim that it’s factually incorrect, is incorrect.
How about I said to you that all men are descendants of Genghis Khan? Well, 1 in 200 are, and Eric Swalwell is 1 of the 198 Democrat representatives (though that percentage gets much lower if we lump in total Democrats in elected office...) http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/08/1-in-200-men-...
My claim that the president's factually incorrect statements, are factually incorrect, remain unchallenged in any rhetorically effective way, though I invite you to try again if you please.
That is an "example" of an "overly corrupt" government that labels them far-right, because they would otherwise have lost an election to them? What speech of the AfD got censored in any shape or form?
Yes, in other countries what is considered far-right in Germany is considered centrist. Those countries also consider what we consider centrist as leftists. So? They're a German political party, they will get judged by Germans, on the grounds of German history, thankyouverymuch.
> perhaps only censor stuff that is related to illegal activities or terrorism
So basically, back to square one, since you haven't really solved the problem of who defines that and how (which we do actually over centuries, it's not a problem to not have it solved once and for all perfectly, right now -- if anything the problem here is the misunderstanding that this could be possible), achieving nothing other than claiming that the AfD isn't far-right.
But why don’t they apply the same censorship to the far left? That’s where I have my problem with it, it isn’t to protect the people from the far right, it’s to control public discourse in a way that reinforces their leftist ideology. The Communist Party isn’t censored in Europe, but right-wing groups are. You can celebrate Stalin, but would be arrested for celebrating Hilter. How is that any different than Chinese censorship? Maybe degree, but definitely not intent.
It's almost, but not quite, false equivalence. You could make a moral relativism argument, but at the end of the day the global zeitgeist is moving towards the "good" that some people associate with liberal values, and always has been.
From an anthropological standpoint, I'm with you - the ideologies are indistinguishable. From a moral standpoint, I disagree strongly - one is generally Bad, the other is generally Good.
The best would be to just admit that Europe is wrong in censoring stupid far right (Nazis), while mostly ignoring stupid far left (Commies).
But some people liked the pseudo-communist regimes, while almost nobody liked Nazi occupation (which is still in fresh memory). So the opposition to banning Commies is real and noticeable. So not so simple.
Tl;dr: Simplified "moral standpoint" holds no water in these discussions.
It's literally both the biggest player and the biggest threat to freedom in the world.
That's a good place to start.
Maybe google should commit to a policy of "protected free speech" on a wide range of political topics that it will never censor in any country (roughly in line with the first amendment).
Great idea.
And that sounds reasonable. I hate FUD-spreading around e.g. immigration, but I don't support any censorship around it. Just debunk the FUD, hiding it won't solve anything, and might hurt a lot when some people get "redpilled" by discovering censored opinions.
My guess is that it is already here, just for things we deem acceptable. The problem with censorship is that everyone has something they think acceptable to censor, so the infrastructure to censor will be developed with mass approval.
Also, as China requires more surveillance infrastructure to be built for Chinese google, that can bleed over to western google. Let's say Google starts to enhance China's social credit score system with users search behavior. It's easier for western governments to point to these capabilities on China's Google and request for them to be instantiated in their own countries.
People should be made aware that there's a filter and all searches are made available to the government.
But Facebook can influence elections. Something isn't adding up to 100% here.
More so, I'm not worried about Google influencing China, I'm worried about China putting pressure on Google to spy on the world or lose potential profits.
That said, they need to be rewarded for moving or a boycott wouldn't help anything.
China is already the second largest economy and their goal is to be a world leader in AI by 2025. China isn't going to be left out of anything.
> and purely ideological.
Umm. Is that not _the_ point? OP disagrees with China gov't ideology so hard, that it just can't support it (the ideology) in any direct way?
It won't really help them, and focusing on the Chinese market misses the most insidious problem: a censored Google search engine in the PRC gives the Chinese Communist Party leverage over Google outside of the PRC. Just look at what happened with the airlines: the PRC forced them to change their foreign websites to reflect a PRC political positions by threatening their access to their market.
Think of what they could do to "uncensored" American Google with similar leverage:
* Chinese human rights websites are deranked from relevant searches down to the second or third page. This is a subtle and deniable type of censorship.
* Ditto with critical coverage of Tibet or Xinjiang.
* Taiwan is shown on Google maps and infoboxes as part of the PRC.
* Google gives Xinhua, the PRC's English-language propaganda outlet [1], prominence on Google news.
* etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinhua_News_Agency#Bias_&_poli...
But I agree with the core point - the 'legal' influence would bother me just as much.
I'm totally against censorship. But I also don't agree the those who see themselves stand on the moral high ground while don't understand the complexity of the issue. Also a lot of people don't differentiate facts and opinions. They blame those who don't agree them are influenced by China government.
Google has already provided China with a product: uncensored search. If the Chinese (for the sake of argument, naively assuming that the CCP acts on behalf of its citizens) don't think that's what's best for China, fine. They don't have to use it.
That's exactly the issue people have. Censorship. No one should be deciding what others can search.
You do realize that the "people" do not have a voice in China right? It is not a democracy...
The Chinese had a century or more of bloody civil war recently, within historical terms. They don't like regime change.
They historically were fine under the emperor, who was authoritarian. They are use to autocratic, central government. Unless things get extremely bad, I don't see them thinking that democracy is better than their current stability. If Xi Jinping does a decent job of getting rid of corruption and improving the air quality, I doubt you'll see a revolt even with a depression in China.
Edit: for those downvoting, how about a dialog? Democracy is not a native idea for the Chinese. Their major philosophical systems support a rigid hierarchy, which is not compatible with the democratic norm of anyone can attempt to run for office. They've lost millions to wars before Mao calmed everyone down. Even with Mao's major famine, there wasn't a revolt. 45 million died, and no uprising. If 100k died at the hands of the US government, there would be blood in the streets. Probably true with 1k. The Chinese do not care about authoritarianism.
Democracy is no more a native idea for western culture; 250 years ago every state was a monarchy, and political ideologies based in hierarchy still regularly win elections.
Also, you cannot use the word "choice" when no options were ever given. A large chunk of people can be unhappy with how the government operates while still not marching the streets. The world is not binary. People living in China also know that the government went to extreme lengths when it came to ending protests in the past: shooting at their own citizens.
Wrong. The government’s Just is to protect life and liberty and ensure a legal framework for the enforcement of contracts. It’s just is most certainly not deciding what is best for people. Protect my rights and otherwise stay out of the way.