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.
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.
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.
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.
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.