Not only PR.

Compared with what came before and what was competing with it in those days google search was terrific. Finding more of what you wanted faster. Clean interface. Ads off to the side clearly identified. People just felt good about using google product. That's a great place to start any PR. People's affection for polish of Apple Product compared with horrible machines most have been forced to use in pod farms etc worked the same way for Steve Jobs.

Assange has been claiming for a decade that Google is now "big and bad." Not sure if I believed him then. He was also claiming the US desperately wanted to put in him in jail while being dismissed by Hilary Clinton. He was right there. And that many people in the US govt and military industrial complex wanted to kill him and it was a lot more than just an idle thought. Right there too. His PR is shockingly bad.

US intel community assessed that Wikileaks was a thin front/wrapper for Russian intelligence operations intended to harm the US and allies. A kind of "launderer" at best for docs that Russian hackers or agents would steal or forge. Assange was the key guy behind Wikileaks. Therefore, Assange is... neither credible or honorable.

Actually they did not. They've tried that line but we saw they were saying the exact opposite just recently. They could not link wikileaks to russia so were throwing the idea around of assassinating Assange instead. While declaring other journalists non-journalists if they didn't just reproduce this kind of nonsense propaganda. Recall Assange had just released and commented on the Afghanistan papers showing what a debacle that war was, about which, 10 years later and 20 after it started we cannot really have any serious doubt.

It's insane! I would not have believed any of this a decade ago and yet here we are.

https://au.news.yahoo.com/kidnapping-assassination-and-a-lon...

>10 years later and 20 after it started we cannot really have any serious doubt.

It's exactly because I never had any serious doubt, that I identify anyone promoting a narrative about it being revealed by a hero as someone's propaganda.

There are lots of competing conspiracy theories. That might be because there are lots of competing conspiracies.

Nothing people say is true or reliable, but the act of saying it is a kind of truth that seeps through about the PR operation behind it.

All my life, people have been blaming the CIA for everything. Regardless of how much is true, that propaganda can't exist without a source. You know who likes to blame the CIA, and who likes to blame Russians and who likes to blame "Zionists" and so on. I mean, you can guess.

"The sky is blue in Moscow" might be true or might not be. But if someone says that to me, then it expresses some truth about them, that they want me to believe it is true, or they are using reverse psychology, or something. But it represents a truth that can be relied on no matter how dishonest the speaker.

"Actions speak louder than words" including when the actions are speaking words.

There's a massive difference between making a claim and backing it with overwhelming evidence. Wikileaks did the latter with regard the Afghan war. There was a massive smear of Assange anyway so even here people seriously say things like he's doing propaganda for russia with zero evidence backing that but with the clear implication that you don't need to take account of the overwhelming evidence presented. And he published un-filtered source so you aren't viewing through any lens! Still the smear worked! That success cost about 1.5 trillion dollars, countless lives and is astoundingly immoral.

But yeah, that's the next go to smear that you're identifying there. Can't make "Bernie or Tulsi works for putin" stick because it's false? Go with he's anti-semitic. It's nuts.

I think we've got to hold anti-semitism smears without evidence backing them in about the same regard as disparaging people for being Jewish. Both are actually promotion of anti-semitism. When anti-semitism is a go-to smear it loses meaning and the real thing, the vile thing, the thing that is actually violent and dangerous that must be opposed draws strength far more so than some hideous human goose stepping in the ugliest fancy dress, for example.

Maybe you should look at individual claims about the CIA and what evidence supports them before deciding if an individual claim is justified or garbage.

Pompeo has said the leakers of the yahoo story should be jailed. Not something you say if there isn't rather a lot of truth behind it. Isikoff isn't known for being friendly to russia in his reporting. He's recanted much of it now but was pushing the Trump is compromised by Putin line based on the ridiculous Steele dossier. May have been first cab off the rank there, I don't recall.

Something else that surprised the hell out of me recently was that the FBI never saw the Democrat party servers claimed to have been hacked by Russia. Only private contractors saw the evidence, contractors hired by the same crook-lawyer who fabricated the Trump has a private server connected to alpha bank insanity. Everyone has been repeating the democrats were hacked by the russkies and wikileaks published it with very, very scant evidence in support of it.

It'd be easy to weave conspiracy theories about it but waiting for more evidence to hold people to account is fine. And maybe I'm getting conspiracy minded in my old age because I'm not completely convinced that Epstein committed suicide either, I'd like more evidence for that before accepting it as fact as well. Has anyone actually asked Bill Gates about his story that he hung out with Epstein because Epstein had access to donors? Like "Who on this planet can you not get a meeting with given you're the richest guy in the world for the past 2? 3? decades? Seriously who can Epstein introduce you to who won't take your phone call Bill?" [1] Why has no interviewer asked him that? Why hasn't the media reporting on Bill's excuses for hanging with Epstein pointed out that this question is unanswered whenever they write about it? It just doesn't seem like quality journalism does it?

[1] There may be a good answer. Bill may have done nothing at all wrong. It's just hard to understand how it makes sense and needs further explanation at the minimum.

“steal or forge”

There is a huge difference between those two. Would be interesting to know how much was “forged.” At one point I thought they tried to vet the dumps pretty well to maintain credibility.

Even assuming it’s 100% legit documents. In an environment where all parties do bad things, but country A selectively exposes parts of country B’s dirty laundry in a way that would benefit country A and uses Wikileaks as the tool to achieve that - well it’s hard to see Wikileaks as this neutral party that does unequivocal good for the world. I’ll change my mind when Wikileaks publishes oh I don’t know, details on Putin’s palace maybe.

So a whistleblower from company A should wait until company B has a whistleblower, otherwise it will look bad?

No. But if an entity C keeps publishing whistleblower documents from company A but not B, it’s reasonable to wonder if C is in fact not a neutral actor.

As far as I am aware there is zero accusation that Wikileaks have not published absolutely everything that has been submitted to them regardless of who it helps or hinders.

You can't publish what nobody has leaked to you. They don't investigate, they don't hack phones, they don't "go looking" they sit and wait with their secure drop boxes for someone to send them documents. They then try to verify them and publish them.

There is also zero accusation that I have ever seen that they've published anything forged. Which is remarkable given how controversial they are and how many people are desperate to make something stick.

Is it reasonable that these things are rarely at the top of the list of facts in this discussion of wikileaks good or bad? Is it reasonable to ask why the "Why don't you leak on Putin" comes up so often when its such obvious garbage for a publisher? [1]

[1] If wikileaks had not published something that makes Putin or Hilary or Donald or whoever you think they're in league with look bad when it was clear that it was leaked to them that's a very serious charge and one we would all take notice of. I'm pretty sure I'd cross the road to avoid Assange as a person myself. I don't know if I'd consider him worse than George Bush Jnr, the late Colin Powell, Hilary, Donald, Blair. Do you really /like/ these people more than Assange after what they have done? It's not necessary to like Assange to take an interest in the story and the evidence. And fwiw I don't particularly /like/ him at all.

And you just believe everything the "US intel community" says?

Yeah if we're talking about "neither credible or honourable" then surely governments and their intelligence agencies fit that description

Yea I was just going to say, the only reason you think more fondly of Google's than Facebook's image is a clear example of one company having a far superior PR department than another.

It might be true at the very beginning when Google was simply a search engine that they truly were "doing no evil." It's also true at the very beginning of Facebook that they were truly trying to build a social network that made the world more open and connected by bringing grandparents closer to their grandkids thousands of miles apart.

> It's also true at the very beginning of Facebook that they were truly trying to build a social network that made the world more open and connected by bringing grandparents closer to their grandkids thousands of miles apart.

Is this really true about Facebook?

I did not go into details as to what Google misbehaviors were.

But I wonder what "behaving poorly" is. There is legal and illegal stuff.

Companies give jobs to people, not only Google. It is natural, yes, natural, logical, to want to pay less to people. It is also natural that people want to be paid more. A salary is never high enough for an employee. A salary is never low enough for an employer. I do not say this from an ethical point of view, I say how humans act.

Also, with all these regulations, unfortunately, government-company collusion is also there, not only among companies. I wonder if markets were more free than they are if the collusion among companies (given that governments cannot regulate as much) would be as effective. I just wonder, because I am not sure, but I am confident it would be better than what we usually see in the media, which much of it is the consequence of disproportionate power for regulating.

About behaving "poor" each person has her own ethics. Things that look ok to someone can look bad to others. And many look bad to most of us, especially when it is someone else who does it... which is curious. Companies are greedy, when it is not our company. Companies are bad, when it is not our company... our neighbor does not deserve what we deserve, because we are better.

So the only measure by which we should measure companies is by law (even I find some laws absurd, but that is another topic). If some laws and regulations give power to make excuses that favor corruption via favoring friends, then maybe the problem is the capacity to regulate.

I do not think an independent company would work for a government in "unethical" terms (as for many of our mostly accepted definition of unethical, like helping military research or giving surveillance tech to governments) if that government cannot give them something in exchange. We see the pattern? The problem is that exactly. Do not look further.

I promise you both companies have very well defined and strongly worded ethical policies against collusion. Plus, budgets for things like the OP would involve multiple layers of an organization with lots of required sign-off. So if true, this would be damning for all those involved.

As to your other point, I'm sure you're aware that governments and private companies are afforded different rules of engagement. We decided a century ago that allowing companies to collude ended up oppressing markets in negative ways and should not be tolerated. So not sure why you're using one to justify the other.

Collusion via regulations still exists today. As long as there are rulers it will exist.

Thinking the opposite is being very innocent, in my view. But all happens in non-obvious ways and in the background, you are going to see a tiny fraction of what happens.

From the very beginning Google’s public ethos was “don’t be evil”, not “don’t break the law”. They essentially asked for their behavior to be judged subjectively.

This whole explanation smells of "late capitalism". But even so, we have to judge companies ethically, because how else would new regulation be conceived of?

My point here (I got a rain of negatives, but I got used to, my opinions seem to be very particular) is that we need objetive law to judge.

But the fact of creating laws in large sectors of people's lives creates evil incentives and dependence on people who did not take part in creating wealth for others.

I just find it contradicting.