Imagine if Google had this policy last year, and a scientist posted a Google Slides presentation about the merits of the lab theory (and imagine it was banned under the misleading "health" information umbrella) ....
Disclaimer: I use dropbox (mostly since they have supported linux since when I started using the service, and when I started using the service, the syncing was much better than google drive) But now I have another reason!
Not a distinction I imagine automated moderation systems are going to manage well, of course, but it exists.
We should be a little more forgiving of minority positions and a little less forgiving of majority positions, so that the truth can be determined more readily.
A reminder, at the start of the pandemic, the majority position was "Masks are bad". The "Masks are good" minority position had no evidence to back it up besides common sense, yet it is only through the efforts of those people fighting the conventional wisdom that the truth came out.
Why do they get to be the arbiter of what information deserves presentation as truth with no evidence, when they allow Mein Kampf to be presented as such?
This is all assuming that setting a file to public in Google Drive is considered "presenting it as the truth with no evidence."
I don't think there is an easy, obvious line there—direct calls to harm (murder these people) shouldn't be accepted, and I believe even beyond that there should be limits, but find that line and enforcing that is very hard.
In some way though, I am happy that this "diversity of thought" exists because that's the only thing that can stop companies like Google from becoming the arbiter of truth. It is just sad that a lot of those countries are also ok with calls for murder and violence.
Also, if they use controversy as their metric instead, they're going to start squashing minority views. It is actually much harder than you might think to decide what is and isn't obviously true, particularly when there is a team of moderators involved (or team of people calibrating the robots which is maybe how Google does it).
Censorship is really dangerous.
One of the reasons it was assumed false was that the scientific community bought into the original letter from Peter Daszak. It turns out Daszak has conflicts of interest regarding WIV and GoF research that, in theory, could have caused the pandemic.
It is incredibly naive to allow people to be the gatekeepers of information that is inconvenient for them.
The same journalists who said lab leak theory was "racist" (NYT's chief COVID editor made this claim less than a month ago)?
The same organizations who said COVID was not transmisable human-to-human in late January, following orders from the CCP (the WHO made this claim repeatedly, without independently verifying it)?
Science is a continual pursuit of what is accurate and even then when we have a scientific proof, it's often not always permanent.
It was a theory that this came from a lab. It was perhaps another theory that the lab was working on this perhaps in part as a bioweapon. We can get into the politics of why China in general can't really be trusted and so who the heck knows... and that of course leads to skepticism and theories such as these.
These theories may or may not be true the same way "covid-19" came from a wet market may or may not be true. It's okay to say we don't know, here are some theories... That's science.
We should try to get to the bottom of it so that whatever happened is exposed and we can learn from this.
A third party getting in the way and deciding based on who knows what, what theories are okay to talk about and what theories are not okay to talk about is a horrible idea.
Perhaps Google is working on a multi-billion dollar deal with China to put Google in all of the phones made in China? You better believe that if China told Google, "Hey this theory is false (trust us), you better take down anything that talks about it"... Google would be very pressured to comply.
though covid is interesting in other ways too. like vaccines.
I'm ok with allowing someone to think whatever crazy bs they want.
But I'm also fine with removing the 'megaphone' for words that are dangerous to our health. You're allowed to stand on a soap box in a public square, but you're not guaranteed to have your speech boosted on the giant billboard screens above.
The dilemmas we are facing here are inherent to how these platforms are setup and optimized.
The algo is designed to boost the crazy-ness to infect others, therefore stopping the spread of this danger tends to stop the individual speech in terms of how normal posts/content works.
Shadowbanning seems like the answer, and that seems to be what Google is doing here. Though not allowing for instance a public doc url isn't in the shadows.
The key start of the policy is "Do not distribute." Which is why I don't understand why people are up in arms about.
it's a totally different thing if Google goes beyond this and just deletes private content from some algo filter.
New York Post got hold of it, published some very damning articles in mid October.
So Facebook and Twitter promptly banned sharing the article as "misinformation". It has all since been confirmed, but now the election is over.
¹ Or maybe there are worse cases where the silencing was more effective.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Goldstein
edit: viscous indeed
The way I read that, they could conceivably boot you just for having a private diary of racist rants. I don't know if they intend it that way; it's also possible that they'd interpret "speech" as meaning "speech where somebody else can hear you".
But if you were looking for more reason to drop your Drive subscription, that might be it.
These things have happened:
>The Trump campaign has sent Facebook advertisements to tens of thousands of voters in swing states, erroneously telling them it was election day after the social media group’s ad blockers failed to detect messages that violated its rules on misinformation
Is the election date a matter of opinion? I don't think that lying about what day is election day is protected speech- its malicious and attacks the very foundation of Democracy.
If so google is actually scanning what is supposed to be private information.
It makes sense, though, to enforce one single policy: otherwise, just becoming a paying customer would be a loophole to circumvent phishing etc policies.
I guess the crux here is when, exactly, they start scanning the content. Is that perhaps the moment the content is first shared?
It doesn’t seem to be documented.
Am I just too cynical or are you naive for thinking they aren't datamining absolutely anything they can get their hands on?
This individual seems to look at events that happen that don’t align with their prejudices and assumes that the signal is an aberration.
Nihilists get burned. You have to hold people accountable for the consequences of their action rather than their intention.
Google can and will scan anything you feed it.
What will trigger it? Fan pages to Trump/Qanon? Antivaxxer propaganda? The German federal police paper on how to clandestinely manufacture heroin? Or maybe just a 20mb text file with the “卐” character?!
Update:
I'm getting a lot of criticism here.
If your aim is to try to get me to actually make the switch, then the approach you are taking is counter-productive. Instead, I guess you are doing what most people do when faced with something they disapprove of: they do the thing that is easiest and most satisfying, which is to criticize or punish the other person, and to pat themselves on the back for being better.
But criticizing people just isn't an effective way to change people's minds or behavior.
What would work in this case? Showing them a path forward.
In this case, I presented a real problem, that it would be a major inconvenience to switch. That is the truth. I don't live in some idealized fantasy world, where I can take actions for free.
The second best things we can do is support projects and be vigilant against the creep of corporate interests into FOSS.
Please stand by while I puke and shit and regret opening the comments section of an article discussing whether the first amendment is still valid.
Most people are like you though, too lazy to do anything and they'll subject themselves to whatever big G says is good for them.
You can voice your disagreement, and still use the platform as long as they don't cross the line. That doesn't mean you haven't prepared a plan for degoogling your life and accept the inconveniences.
If so... do you think that your ISP also has a legitimate interest in regulating use of it's services as means of distributing information?
It's definitely not just a hypothetical risk either. In the last month, Facebook blocked me from distributing my blog post on Django best practices because they claim it violates their community standards. It's literally a post about how to structure API code, but now they're claiming that it's advocating for genocide or something and there's apparently no one to appeal to or any way to reverse this.
For reference: https://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2021/06/django-for...
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/?q=https%3A%2F%2...
Twice in the last week a comment of mine got blocked on Facebook for violating policies. In the first case, I posted a link to an EPA website and a screenshot of a graph posted on it, showing a reduction in smog in the last 10 years compared to 1987. In the second, I pasted a screenshot of something from the CDC's COVID Tracking site and a link to a British research paper on the efficacy of the vaccines wrt the delta variant. In the second case, my link was broken somehow, which might have contributed to the problem somehow?
They never went back up.
I suppose limiting sharing might be justified. But limiting access and/or deleting own files is outrageous.
For that matter, collections of misleading content can have legitimate purposes. Such as research.
Now I'm seriously considering dropping my Drive subscription.
Update: I got a lot of upvotes, but tbh I may have misunderstood the new policy, which does seem to (maybe?) only be limited to distribution of misleading content. I do think Google has a legitimate interest in regulating use of it's services as means of distributing information. I'm not sure where the line is, though. For example, if I sent an email to a friend in which I said something that isn't true, I think I would rightly be upset if Google refused to deliver the email. OTOH, if I was sending this to large numbers of people regularly, as part of some kind of misinformation operation, then maybe blocking me would be a legitimate. Complicated.