If they had these policies in January, I would have been banned for disagreeing with the WHO and saying that this pandemic was serious.
Independent journalists were warning us about this since November, despite the best efforts of the Chinese government and American tech companies.
But it would have been fake news, until it turned out to be true. They want to be able to decide whatever the truth is in the moment, and silence anyone who disagrees.
It's obvious to me that they simply wanted to preserve as much PPE as possible for those on the front lines who needed it most. But they could've just said that, instead of eroding their own credibility with lies. It's no wonder the pandemic response has become divided along political lines when people can't trust their government to give them facts.
When it comes to the Enterprise deployments we provide to our employees, we are not willing to accept the risk that some files may disappear, without warning or chance to internally remediate, because a user decided to share it too widely or decided to share something against some arcane terms of service. We pay too much for this kind of invisible impact to our business. Its our role in this customer-provider relationship to remediate this. If we didn't remediate it in a timely manner, they would have every right to suspend service. but we've seen no evidence that we would even be provided this warning.
edit: apparently I'm rate-limited from making new posts, but JackFr's response to me below is completely fair. Sorry for not reading more thoroughly!
I was responding to the first sentence, which really wasn’t the whole point of the parent though.
Has it? It's remained stable as far as I can tell; maintain distance from others, minimize interactions with others. There has been some evolution in disease treatment, but it has been a rather measured evolution.
> It's profoundly disturbing how enthusiastic some people are to start censoring anything that goes against the official narrative.
This is a bit unfair. I'm in favor of censoring speech that demonstrably causes harm. This is done in many nations where they are arguably more free than the US despite our age-old slogan from the early 1800s which implies we're unique in having demoratic freedoms (namely European nations). There does not seem to be a significant propaganda effect or unwarranted censorship in those nations - in fact, quite the opposite, as they appear to be better educated and better informed than Americans. Perhaps in the past, America's version of free speech guaranteed liberty; but now it's just as often used (if not more, in our media) to cause harm - anti-vax, hate speech of all sorts, anti-mask, advocating taking hydroxychloroquine without supportive medical evidence or examination, general misleading of the American public.
It might be more prudent to be careful about accepting what you read at first glance; why would google allow someone to stream data (against policy for the product), let alone when that content violates their policies on their content streaming networks? Do you think they should leave up public to other content that violates their policies, just because it's tied to a private account?