My mind boggles that people have opinions like this. It is so anti-liberal. Every evil regime in history takes it upon itself to define and eliminate hateful content, using the contemporary unconscionable act to justify this evil.

To be a good liberal, Google has to decide if it's a publisher or platform. IF it's a publisher, then the hateful content is coming from them and they must take editorial control of google docs and whatnot. If they're a platform provider, then they get the same protections as telephone network operators and others from the actions of their users.

This current situation is the start of the road to tyranny.

>Every evil regime in history takes it upon itself to define and eliminate hateful content, using the contemporary unconscionable act to justify this evil.

>This current situation is the start of the road to tyranny.

I'm not a historian, but I can't think of many examples where an evil regime gained power by slowly "boiling the frog" and gradually eroding free speech rights.

Communist dictators typically seized power in a violent revolution spurred on by deliberate misinformation campaigns.

Many of the Middle-Eastern dictators seized power in a not-so violent revolution (at least, not violent enough to cause a full-scale civil war) spurred on by deliberate misinformation campaigns.

The colonial powers maintained their grip on power by denying education to the natives, and when they left the dictators that took their place seized power by violence even in a Western legal framework.

Maybe the Nazis did this (I'm honestly not sure), and maybe Julius Caesar too? But this doesn't seem to be a set-in-stone, guaranteed way of seizing power.

I think the protections for phone operators are the anti liberal parts.

These companies are choosing to repeat what people tell them. They should always be considerate when doing so.

Picking operators who's opinions align with yours is the liberal way, using the free market to pick which ideas get repeated

CP is already illegal and google doesn’t need to arbitrate whether its illegal or not. Blocking CP is neutral and a basic.

It’s when google decides to block things that aren’t illegal that they get into the weeds, and companies framing opinions they disagree with as “Dangerous misinformation” is itself dangerous misinformation, and a net negative on society.

Google should not be arbitrating truth. They are not qualified, not capable, and not honest enough to do it, and they will never be.

I don’t know a single person in real life I would trust to censor what I can and can’t see, and I trust google much less than those people I actually know.

It's funny to me that , in my mind HN = SV and SV is hyper liberal and listening to NPR which is also fairly liberal all the shows I listen to are calling for exactly "Google and Facebook need to ban all speech we don't like"

this isn't Google's problem. It's a society level problem. Google is just responding to the pressure

Modern liberal is generally fairly pro-censorship; pro-authoritarian. The word's definition has just flipped in recent years, so it means different things to different people.

That’s like 3 layers of assumption.

Google doesn’t want to eliminate its cash cow, and doesn’t want to be associated with crazy fringe people. It’s pretty simple really.

Running this stuff through a “liberal” or “conservative” lens isn’t productive. Big public companies care about making money and eliminating risks associated with doing so.

I think you underestimate the desire of people to conform, to push their political agenda through their work, etc.

Big companies aren't at risk from losing money for quashing unpopular speech - it's exactly why unpopular speech is the speech that generally needs protecting.

To a point.

I think being credited with empowering right wing nuts can blowback though.

That's narrative not reality. There's plenty of blowback but that's why it's important to protect unpopular speech. Its why the ADL argued the nazis should be able to march in milwaukee. Because when you create a mechanism to censor and restrict you have to know that it can be turned against any speech those in control find they don't like.

Are nazis marching near the homes of holocaust survivors disgusting? Sure. But there's a reason why it should be allowed if you and your children and their children are going to experience fundamental freedom instead of the arbitrary wishes of a government that may replace this one or the next one or the next one.

extrapolate from there.

I don’t need to - Google’s actions demonstrate it.

Google Drive is a private resource, not an avenue in Milwaukee. Google is not the government.

You have the freedom to speak, but not in a newspaper you don’t own. You have the freedom to assemble, but not in a privately owned shopping mall.

Sadly today we live on a world where the town square is digital but he government has failed to declare it common carrier. That is a failing of society and a reason just a few people can control the speech of billions.

You are technically correct based on current legal precedent but only because of the government's failure to regulate these companies not because it's inherently so.

If Milwaukee had been a company town they would still have been required to allow it, but because of weak politicians failing to ensure free speech is preserved we have arrived at a point where Mark Zuckerberg or Google's trust and safety team can arbitrarily ban speech for billions without any consequence or legal challenge.

Meanwhile just the other day the white House spokesperson was asking why if someone is banned on one platform they aren't banned on all of them automatically. If you don't see this dystopian future just over the hill you never will until it's too late.

To reframe, perhaps we live in a society where anyone who wants to can join the town square by putting up their own website, but almost everyone would much rather hang out in the hotel lobbies of Facebook, Google, and Twitter because the amenities are much nicer and those companies hand out free megaphones (in the form of interest-surfacing algorithms).

Is it "censorship" when they simply choose not to be the medium to communicate that data to you?

If so, that puts the entire search apparatus in the category of "censorship," since it makes opinionated decisions regarding what the answer to your query should be. Choosing to refrain from vending a Drive URL is basically the same thing.

Edit: I could see an argument that they're being a bad steward of other people's data if they choose not to honor share requests on content they host or choose to remove content they've previously hosted. In which case, I'm glad they're putting the fact they'll do that right in a public disclosure, and it is something people should consider when choosing Drive to host their content.

The search apparatus is exactly the target of those trying to implement censorship.

Six months ago saying covid-19 originated in a lab was verboten on many platforms - saying it on facebook or YouTube would get you called a purveyor of misinformation and the content deleted and and your account at risk.

Suddenly it turns out the people involved at the government level funded the work exactly, and they worked with these companies to define what was misinformation, and suddenly Jon Stewart is making jokes about it and these companies allow it to be talked about again.

If you don’t understand how dangerous the platforms that house our public speech banning some speech based on “misinformation” is you aren’t paying any attention. They have set up their systems to detect/downrank/remove arbitrary content and that will be used for political reasons - it already has been and quite recently.

We live in dangerous times and a lot of people are oblivious.

No, of course not. Every entity is allowed to manage how’s its property is used.

Barnes and Noble isn’t censoring anyone because it chooses to feature some books on an end cap vs. buried on the shelf.