First, it's not about private files, it's about distributing content.
Google isn't spying on your private files, but does scan them when you share them publicly. E.g. keep all the pirated movies you want on your Drive, and even give private access to friends, but the moment you make them publicly viewable Google scans them and limits access accordingly. So no, this isn't applying to your private diary or privately shared documents.
And second, to those who claim absolute free speech with no limits -- notice that the two main categories here are related to democracy and health. All our legal protections ultimately depend on a democratic foundation -- undo that with misinformation and you don't have anything anymore. Similarly, your rights don't matter much if you're dead. Companies aren't allowed to advertise rat poison as medicine and neither are you.
There's something fundamentally flawed about the idea that censorship in the name of preventing misinformation is protecting the foundation of democracy.
You cannot have true democracy if people cannot disagree with their governments, they must be able to disagree with any truth or opinion such a government might consider self-evident, just on the off chance they're right.
I should at this point note that Google doesn't directly claim to go quite that far in preventing misinformation, they mostly claim to disallow things that could harm the democractic process (e.g. telling people to vote at the wrong place, their candidate has died, etc.). At least that kind of information is usually agreed upon (if not there are bigger problems than mere misinformation), though they seem to try to include claims of voter-fraud, which is a bit dangerous.
Imagine if Britain had this same technology when the USA was founded... It of course would have quickly cracked down on communications and it would have done so in the name of "peace" and "what's right"...
This idea that thinking critically of a government and even believing that perhaps the government as it stands today is not the government "of and for the people" (sure could be interpreted as anti-democracy by that same corrupt government)... And maybe that's not correct, but who is the government to say that we can or cannot challenge them in public discourse as it is supposedly protected under the first amendment?
This is indeed an insanely slippery slope and people willing to trade their freedoms because they think it's for the ultimate good, I think are really making a mistake... it's not difficult to understand that this is one of the first steps of an actual fundamentally corrupt government... This is easily open to abuse and vast interpretation.
If the American revolution had happened 100 years later it would have looked like the Boer war. That's the war where the British used barbed wire and the machine gun to invent the concentration camp.
> If the American revolution had happened 100 years later it would have looked like the Boer war.
Smart. It would have. That is indeed how you fight an insurgency.
Not sure how new it really is though. Compare and contrast to the Harrying of the North.
> to invent the concentration camp
I hear they borrowed the idea from the Spanish in Cuba.
Compared to alternatives, it was supposed to be more humane: "Get the civilians out of harm's way (and keep them from aiding the guerillas without killing them)".
It wasn't until the Nazi extermination camps of WW2 that the phrase "concentration camp" took on such negative valences.
Granted people did die in concentration camps, but the deaths were of things like cholera -- the same diseases that would run through army camps. Arguably we still have them today, under the new name "refugee camp".
> the Boer war
It shouldn't be left out that the British had a decent case for moral high ground in that war. The Boers were religious hyper-conservatives who believed God had given them a right to Black slaves, whereas the British had banned slavery throughout the Empire and were going to some expense to enforce this.
The bigger problem that I have with the idea that misinformation kills democracy is that it seems to suggest that misinformation is some new phenomenon or that the average person has been well informed throughout the history of western democracy.
Democracy thrived before the printing press. Democracy survived the invention of the printing press, which was mostly in the hands of magnates who could afford it. Democracy survived the invention of television and radio, which was (and still is) in the hands of a select few magnates. We build up terms like "journalistic integrity" and look at the past with rose colored glasses as if these mediums delivered pure objective truth.
If anything, what we're seeing with the internet is a more true democracy with a wider range of opinions, less controlled by small groups of plutocrats. If you don't like to see the death of that plutocracy, or you're happy to see a new group of benevolent plutocrats come in to retake control the narrative, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but you don't really like democracy.
> suggest that misinformation is some new phenomenon
Misinformation in this shape and form is a new phenomenon. And it is not just the scale;
- the number of agents that push their version of misinformation is at least an order of magnitude higher than ever, depending on the particular topic. So-called culture wars have so many different sides.
- technology not only scales misinformation, but it also accelerates it. The objective function of "increased engagement" meshes very well. Hard to grok, full fidelity facts don't get shared or recommended as much as rage-baiting or bias-confirming material.
- technology can on-the-fly piece together material to conform to whatever bullshit you want to hear, I want to hear or the other guy wants to hear. As it is optimized to increase engagement, it can efficiently generate personalized micro-narratives, which is ultimately a reflection of our personal biases.
The problems is it gets harder and harder for these narratives to converge. More on that below.
> If anything, what we're seeing with the internet is a more true democracy with a wider range of opinions, less controlled by small groups of plutocrats
As mentioned, original thoughts don't have the same propagation speed or reach as junk-infotainment, and you're just as subject to the narrative-shaping powers of those "plutocrats" as ever. They just blend in better.
But the larger issue is that you can't equivocate mere plurality with a functioning democracy. Ultimately there is a single reality, and even though we are in divergent positions due to having different entry points and framings, we should be - however little - converging in our narratives and understanding of that reality as time progresses.
But the opposite seems to be happening, we are getting dumber at scale, stuff makes less sense, institutional mistrust is at all-time-high. I am not putting this all on tech, but it certainly pours fuel on the fire of meaning-making crisis.
I wouldn't take it for granted that we could survive this without it creating a larger crisis first.
I want to point out that the biggest reason for this is that those institutions are worthy of mistrust, people just weren't aware of the need to mistrust them. The news media for instance has been gradually getting worse due to having to compete with internet sources and it was plenty shit back in the 60s and before...
Then there's things like the replication crisis damaging our trust in science-as-an-institution and the mask flip flopping damaging trust in science-as-communicated-by-prestigious-bodies.
And of course there's always departments attempting o justify their existence even when it makes everyone's lives harder for little gain (yes, I work for a mega Corp, how did you guess?).
Perhaps, then, we should aim our sights on the institutions and systems that incentivize and profit from the spread of misinformation rather than trying to treat the symptoms and censor misinformation outright. I’m always baffled in these free speech debates of the last 15-10 years why the end up reducing the landscape to a false dichotomy.
What I’m seeing is a disintegration of the narrative, with a relatively small group of disinformation plutocrats bombarding minds at scale with conflicting positions.
A compassionate view of humanity would say that humans are basically accepting. This openness can then be abused by viral misinformation. We could take the view that humans should just be self protecting and if they got duped that’s on them. But IMO that’s a depressing view of the world, and tends toward something like mutually assured social destruction in the limit. We need to protect our shared narrative.
Also personally I find the view that “democracy prevailed before, it’ll continue to prevail somehow” deeply unsatisfying. Democracy is not built into nature. It has to be proactively maintained and refreshed.
Democracy is struggling with misinformation because Governments are losing credibility with citizens, this is not my problem as a regular person.
I'm sick of hearing that it's up to "people" to be fed the right information so they behave the way that works for the Government and large corporations.
Why should I trust the WHO? Why should I trust the FDA? Why would I trust Johnson and Johnson? Why should I trust Pfizer? Why doesn't the Government fund an emergency trial on Ivermectin?
Do you know that these pharmaceutical companies cannot be sued if there is a problem with my health related to the COVID-19 vaccines? Why would I trust a system like that? Why wouldn't I be skeptical and why wouldn't fringe theories appear?
I don't want information to be hidden from me to influence my beliefs, I want all the information made possible to me so I can make up my own mind.
As Edward Snowden says, the worse conspiracies are in plain sight. I'm starting to think he might be right.
> Why doesn't the Government fund an emergency trial on Ivermectin?
Because there's no evidence that it would work? Nobody has explained how it's supposed to act on COVID-19, when it's a nerve poison for invertebrates.
There's not infinite time and effort available for patiently trying every theory with no sound basis, and the worst thing is that there have been small trials with poor or inconclusive results which people ignore. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/ivermectin-is-the-new-hydro...
>Calling ivermectin the same as HCQ is a strawman approach.
Actually, this is the perfect example, as the main compound in HCQ has been proven in several studies unrelated to COVID19, to specifically prevent the 'jelly-lungs' that people with severe critical-case COVID19 died from in high numbers.
You can be skeptical about the vaccine, and fringe theories are normal and some are legitimate. It’s fully normal to be skeptical because you don’t have all the facts. But look at what Tucker Carlson is doing, as one example. He asserts outright falsehoods cynically. Take the wind turbine debacle in Texas for example. He asserted lies that frozen turbines caused the blackouts with implications that wind tech/greener tech is evil. Governor Abbot came on and added his authority to the disinformation. People believed it and got outraged. I watch political Twitter a lot and I can literally see how a cynical lie begins, produces outrage, and goes viral. What’s your opinion on that phenomenon? It seems that has something to do with governments losing credibility.
There's the saying: "don't throw out the baby with the bathwater". What you are saying is true, but we need to hear the voices that would otherwise be unfairly silenced as well.
There's a difference between "skepticism" and raving fucking loonery, and 99.99% of what's proliferating online nowadays is the latter. Shit like that also transforms democracies into dictatorships, at least as much as "blind trust" does.
i hope your getting paid to do so cause thats a full time job. we have to trust some. the gate keepers can be rife with corruption and other influences. most do not have time to validate most things is mostly what i am saying.
there needs to be a middle of control and freedom without the bullshit.
> Also personally I find the view that “democracy prevailed before, it’ll continue to prevail somehow” deeply unsatisfying.
As somebody from a Western country that has gone from democracy -> dictatorship -> democracy within the last 100 years, I couldn't agree more (I'm German). Democracy is fragile and has been under increasing threat for the last 15 years or so, unfortunately partly accelerated by social media.
If we can't agree that democracy is the foundation for freedom of speech, and that there are actors (foreign and domestic) using misinformation to erode trust in democracy, I'm bearish for the future of democracy (at least in the US).
> If we can't agree that democracy is the foundation for freedom of speech
We won't because freedom of speech is the foundation for a healthy democracy, not the other way round. Socrates was executed at the behest of a tyrannical democracy - the original democracy - for his speech.
How do you propose to achieve freedom of speech, in order to have a democracy on top? What prior-to-democracy system would lead toward that free speech? Or do you believe free speech exists by itself in nature, prior to any system?
Correct me if I'm wrong, you seem to be saying that free speech can't exist without democracy.
Firstly, free speech is not a synonym for democracy, we can clearly see there are democracies with differing levels of free speech, some with very low levels.
Secondly, most of the other systems of political organisation are antithetical to free speech. That does not mean, however, that democracy is a necessary pre-requisite for free speech. I can imagine other systems - as have others - but that they do not exist is either because they cannot or because the conditions for them to hold are not there yet.
Finally
> Or do you believe free speech exists by itself in nature, prior to any system?
I'm not a student and this is not a student debating society, please make your points in a way that an adult and professional would expect and can respect. I don't know you, it's far too early for you to take the piss. Try and get into a conversation first, at the very least.
> Correct me if I'm wrong, you seem to be saying that free speech can't exist without democracy.
No, parent is saying freedom of speech is a consequence of democracy, not that one wouldn't exist without the other or that they are synonymous.
One can, as you have, construct and imagine all kinds of political systems where one exists without the other (e.g. Greece 400 BC, benevolent dictator etc). This leads to rather contrived arguments that miss the point at hand: Freedom of speech has almost always been a consequence of modern democracy.
Your flippant response in the last paragraph makes me believe you aren't convinced in your argumentation either.
Do you have examples of democracies before the printing press besides Athens and arguably the late Roman Republic? Those happened nearly two millenniums before the press and didn't last that long. "Thriving"?
Europe had them in the middle ages too: Italy's seafaring republics (Venice, Genoa, Amalfi, Pisa et al) where (nominal) democracies, practically owned the Mediterranean sea and lasted a thousand years.
The vast majority of Slavic tribes 0-1100AD were effective democracies...even the majority of Polish kings post-Christian-indoctrination (1000-1800AD) featured an elected monarchy.
There isn't really. You're adopting, I assume, J.S. Mill's view, that the cure for bad speech is more speech, which he famously published in 1859.
However, since then it's been widely accepted that when speech reaches a certain level of harm then the greater good is to prevent/punish it. You can't incite violence under the guise of free speech. You can't advertise that something is safe when it's not. This is because more speech can't undo violence and death after it occurs.
And when it comes to misinformation with regards to provable and intentional lies about voting procedures, election results, etc. that falsely harm the country's institutions and legitimacy, it's entirely consistent for that to fall under the widely-accepted prohibition of speech that rises to a certain threshold of harm. It directly leads to mobs, riots, and revolution based on lies, not based on actual injustices.
This doesn't mean any harmful speech is prohibited -- that's ridiculous. You're generally allowed to insult people, tell lies, etc. But there's a threshold of harm that gets established.
Annoying that you are getting down voted for what seems to be a very reasonable comment.
I have very few friends “in tech” and this is the view that basically all of them hold, this is the view that most of my family hold. Across the 100-150 people that spans the full (European) political spectrum and many different backgrounds and life experiences from growing up extremely wealthy, finding wealth through hard work (and luck) and success and borderline surviving - do not “SV tech circles”.
Basically it’s a view point that is able to accept nuance and grey. People who work in absolutes dominate headlines so it’s all we hear, in reality the majourity of people live in the middle.
I don’t know about you, but any social group I’ve been part of has had its boundaries beyond which some speech and behavior becomes unacceptable and has consequences. What kind of social groups are you part of where all speech, including lies, insults, smearing, is accepted?
The united states is basically unique in the strength of it's speech protection, and even that is only the government. I'd challenge you to name a social group, any social group, that wouldn't ostracize you for saying certain things.
Freedom of speech is not violated by ostracism, because freedom of speech (as a right) is the right to say what one wants, to whom one wants, at a time of one's choosing and the implied listener's freedom - to listen to whom one wants (or not) at a time of one's choosing (and hence to what one wants).
If someone is ostracised that is an example of the listener exercising their free speech rights, not a violation of them.
Some use this as an example of why companies like Twitter and Facebook may remove someone from their platform, but I would argue firstly that they are a monopoly exercising monopoly power, hence violating one's rights to free speech, and that they are not platforms any more because of their interventionism in the speech of others (and currently have too much protection under law to do this). The monopoly power is the most important thing to challenge, in my view.
To the contrary, many Silicon Valley elites trend far more libertarian than the average population, so it's actually the opposite (depending on which elites you're talking about, they're not monolithic).
And it absolutely is widely accepted if you look at democratically produced law across the world. Restrictions on harmful speech exist literally everywhere in democracies. It's what people vote for. It's absolutely widely accepted.
> And it absolutely is widely accepted if you look at democratically produced law across the world.
Widely believed would be a better phrasing, as you may compare anywhere with low to no support for free speech and they will be more oppressive and violent than anywhere in say Europe or North America that has greater support for free speech, the correlation will be huge.
Then you could compare somewhere like the US with somewhere like France or Germany and ask if there is a greater amount of violence in either and see what could be attributed to speech. I doubt you'll be able to produce strong enough evidence for your position to then claim it as widely accepted over widely believed or just advocated for by parties that benefit from less freedom of speech.
> Widely believed would be a better phrasing, as you may compare anywhere with low to no support for free speech and they will be more oppressive and violent than anywhere in say Europe or North America that has greater support for free speech, the correlation will be huge.
Europe is one place with more limitations on "free" speech, and pretty much no parties or political grass-roots movements here are campaigning for any radical changes towards an American-style legislation. (Right-wing populist parties and movements in several countries are complaining about hate-speech legislation going too far -- and may even have a point -- but AIUI not even that means they're against the main idea that it's right to ban harmful speech; they just disagree on the definition and limits of what's "harmful" with regards to the kind of speech they want to indulge in.)
> Then you could compare somewhere like the US with somewhere like France or Germany and ask if there is a greater amount of violence in either and see what could be attributed to speech.
Crazy American lies freely spread under the guise of "Free speech!" gave you January 6.
It's clear that a handful of genocides were caused in large part by hate speech, such as the Rwandan genocide and the Holocaust.
What's not clear to me (although I'm open either way) is whether strict hate speech laws would've reduced the odds of these happening. Do we have reason to think that to be true?
The first order effect is to chill that kind of speech. But is there a second order effect of making these people into martyrs and fostering resentment towards the protected group that does more harm than good?
My understanding is that pre-Nazi Germany had hate speech laws, and it didn't seem to work there?
Giving anyone the ability to arbitrate what is "good" speech vs "bad" speech is way too much power. In any era of history there have always been "truths" that were massively popular and eventually overturned. I don't think we are the first era to be an exception. So when you're talking about punishing "bad" speech you are talking about creating super powerful entities just because they agree with you. That intent scares me far more than whatever nonsense you get from q anon or antivaxxers.
> Giving anyone the ability to arbitrate what is "good" speech vs "bad" speech is way too much power.
But that isn't at all what is happening here. Google has decided that they don't want to enable people to distribute certain data using their platform. They're not being crowned the omnipotent oracle of good and bad.
> you are talking about creating super powerful entities just because they agree with you.
This position is bizarre to me -- what do you think an elected government is? I vote to create "super powerful entities that agree with me" every 4 years. Those entities possess the power to destroy all life on earth. Google is not anywhere near as powerful as those entities, and while it is not (directly) democratically accountable, it does derive its power from its users.
No information will be permanently erased just because Google does not spend money and time making it available on Drive.
The amount of power google has, they can crown the winner. We can't pretend that "oh thats just google's opinion" when they control access to humanities collective knowledge.
My argument is very humble. Everyone gets to talk, whoever is most convincing gets listened to most. I don't need a paternalistic company protecting me from bad thoughts.
> This position is bizarre to me -- what do you think an elected government is?
A system with an intentional freedom to allow dissent?
> My argument is very humble. Everyone gets to talk, whoever is most convincing gets listened to most. I don't need a paternalistic company protecting me from bad thoughts.
You're talking now, and this isn't (AFAIK) on Google Drive.
You want Drive to be a democratically guaranteed national resource, nationalize Google.
They are not protecting you from bad thoughts. They are protecting themselves from lawsuits.
Moderating all this content is not free. If google was not under risk of losing money by not doing this, they would have done nothing.
It's easy to think that the most powerful entity is the one with the biggest stick. Consider this though: imagine a VIP and their bodyguard. The bodyguard is much stronger and carries a gun, but he is not the one with power. The VIP can replace the bodyguard at will.
An entity that gets to tell millions exactly how to vote and which nuke-wielding bodyguard to hire is surely more powerful than said bodyguard.
The government has an explicit limitation on excersizing that power. The first amendment is, well, first, its not exactly forgettable. The primary law of our land is "government can't fuck around with free speech". I see no ambiguity here. There's a huge difference between shouting fire in a theater vs saying, are the vaccines safe. We can have our disagreements but its in nobody's interest to outlaw them.
Well, no, the first article of amendment (usually abbreviated “first amendment”) is the eighth article of the Constitution, following the seven original articles. “Amendment” is revision/change.
Well thank you for your lawyering, but what's your point? The people that invented this country thought it was very important that people can speak freely (including you!), and you're like "nah"?
That’s not a reasonable position. In the limit that implies that you treat everyone as the enemy. Isolate in your own protected world, because you might get duped or harmed any minute now. That to me is a shitty world I don’t want to live in. I’d rather reasonably trust people and have a common baseline and shared narrative.
>You cannot have true democracy if people cannot disagree with their governments, they must be able to disagree with any truth or opinion such a government might consider self-evident, just on the off chance they're right.
Google is not the government. It's a private company owned by private citizens who also have the same constitutional rights. You're not being 'censored'. It's not a violation of your free speech. You're free to petition the government and you're free to just host your files someplace other than Google Drive. Access to Google Drive is not a 'right'. Quit trying to conflate the two. It's a disingenuous argument meant to confuse the issue and push a personal narrative.
> The scale at which Google operates today, anything short of defining some of its popular products as public utilities would be disingenuous.
Look at that from the perspective of a startup founder. You've made a thing. Spent decades working on it. It became popular because many people found it useful. So useful in fact, that they've decided that it would be nice if you didn't own it anymore, and they owned it instead.
Laws should be the same for everyone. If you're not okay with other people deciding that they own your stuff, don't tell others what to do with the things they've created.
By this argument China's censorship of online messaging platforms doesn't exist either, because Weixin and Weibo are operated by private companies, so what they're doing when they block messages with undesirable content isn't censorship.
I'm not even close to convinced by your response. Relying on the public-private divide as the sole basis for your retort is weak. You also assert that the person is pushing a personal narrative, but I suggest you're doing the same.
There's an argument that private corporations that are involved in dissemination of information (search engines and social media) should respect principles of freedom of speech as a democratic principle, regardless of constitutional mandate.
Suppose the government outsources welfare eligibility decision-making to a private company. Does this mean traditional notions of fairness we would expect from such an decision-maker do not apply, because they are a private company?
The public/private divide is a well-known conundrum. And the analogy I gave is a practical example of that, one that has actually faced several nations. I note you've offered no basis for it being 'dishonest', either, which is unfair. Be careful before making statements like that.
The point is, you look at the substance of what is being done or controlled, not the status of the actor as a private or public entity. That is what the analogy is used to explain.
The substance of what is being done, here, is regulation of communication between individuals over a communication platform. Downplaying it as 'not hosting public content' is inaccurate or at least of no moment. What's public content mean anyway?
If a significant amount of private communication goes through privately owned channels, it is reasonable that the private companies operating those channels respect democratic norms. It's unreasonable to dismiss any criticism as 'they are a private company', as that's beside the point.
I’m definitely on the side of the argument that says power is power, and private companies can do just as much harm as governments can. However, there’s a difference between gov’t censorship and censorship by private companies like we’re talking about here.
It’s the difference between not allowing the government to say what you can publish and requiring a company to publish whatever you want.
So then, I should be able to paint your house and car with whatever messages "I" want and you should not be allowed to erase them. Is that the argument you're making?
If "my" house is actually a meeting place for half the country, or even just half the city, and I've decided almost anyone can paint on the walls, I should not be able to say that one specific person cannot paint on the walls because, for instance, I don't like what party they vote for. Any restriction on wallpainting in that space must be independent of the content of the message. If I wanted to limit that message, I should have to go through the proper democratic circles, ie. pass a city ordnance.
This is the same logic that prevents me from saying that in this meeting hall, gay people are not allowed entry.
I disagree wholeheartedly. If your front yard happens to become a popular meeting space for the town, it doesn't change your rights to your yard. You can still ask anyone to leave for any reason. Google literally built all their infrastructure from the ground-up. It's theirs in the most direct sense of the word, and we should take an attitude of humble gratitude for their ongoing contributions to our wellbeing, rather then continue our attempts to punish them for their success.
You've conflated a few things here. Are we banning people or messages? You've said that bans need to be content neutral, but also that they can't be based on the individual doing the painting. This would mean that, for example porn would need to be acceptable. Or advertisements, but it seems reasonable for the owner to ban both of those things in pursuit of their desired aesthetic.
The actual case seems to be that anyone can paint anything except certain banned things. But any person can still paint other unbanned things.
That's different than banning particular people. In other words, if the republicans are allowed to discuss everything except vaccine conspiracies, you aren't discriminating against republicans, so this analogy about banning individuals doesn't work. And of course you might ban a particular individual from the premises for repeatedly breaking those rules.
All of this seems perfectly reasonable, and indeed I know real-world spaces that operate more or less like this.
> This would mean that, for example porn would need to be acceptable. Or advertisements, but it seems reasonable for the owner to ban both of those things in pursuit of their desired aesthetic.
Yes, I stand by this. If it's legal to have porn on your house wall, it should be legal for people to paint porn on your communal wall.
Again, the solution to this should be a city ordnance. The problem to me is not restrictions but accountability.
> The actual case seems to be that anyone can paint anything except certain banned things. But any person can still paint other unbanned things.
This seems akin to saying that the theocracy does not discriminate against gay men, because they can marry women just like hetero men can.
> Yes, I stand by this. If it's legal to have porn on your house wall, it should be legal for people to paint porn on your communal wall
Why? Why is it that if I allow people to paint things, I lose the right to moderate those things? Like it's still my property, right? What causes me to forfeit my property rights?
Or to ask a perhaps different question, could I close the venue entirely?
What if I later reopened it with a list of allowed people and you could only enter if you were on the list? Do I still forfeit those rights? How big does the list have to be for it to be suitably public again?
> This seems akin to saying that the theocracy does not discriminate against gay men, because they can marry women just like hetero men can.
You're going to have to explain this better. Because in practice banning gay men from marrying men prevents them from getting married at all. Preventing anyone from painting porn doesn't prevent an artist from painting not-porn. I might be more willing to agree if, for example, it was the government blanket banning porn. But we're not talking about that, were talking about one dude with one popular artists venue banning pornographic art being painted. It's not different than if I disallowed the sale of pornography in my art gallery.
Keep in mind, today, in the united states no priest is compelled to officiate a same sex wedding. The state recognizes them, but you or I don't have to.
> Why? Why is it that if I allow people to paint things, I lose the right to moderate those things? Like it's still my property, right? What causes me to forfeit my property rights?
Good question! In my view, the deciding factor is "universality". I think there is a fundamental difference in nature between a friendgroup and a customer base. When you offer a service to your friends, you may pick and choose how you like on any basis. When you offer a service to the general public, you are in a sense attempting to provide a "plug-in" service to society as a whole, and so the terms of that service should be negotiated with society as a whole, including such things as civil rights. This is exactly where you cross the boundary between being "a private citizen" and " part of the state".
> Or to ask a perhaps different question, could I close the venue entirely?
Yes. Nobody can be compelled to offer a service.
> What if I later reopened it with a list of allowed people and you could only enter if you were on the list? Do I still forfeit those rights? How big does the list have to be for it to be suitably public again?
I think this is a sliding scale. The specific cutoff would always be kind of arbitrary.
> > This seems akin to saying that the theocracy does not discriminate against gay men, because they can marry women just like hetero men can.
> You're going to have to explain this better. Because in practice banning gay men from marrying men prevents them from getting married at all.
No it does not; it merely prevents them from getting married in the way that they like, which is a different way than the societal norm. The right to hetero marriage, as practiced in theocratic societies, inherently normalizes hetero relations and excludes gay relations. However, there is nothing inherently wrong - in the erroneous sense, not the moral sense! - about such a choice. This demonstrates that the constraints you apply to a service, even if they only pertain to the nature of the service and not the persons the service is extended to, can still be discriminatory.
> Keep in mind, today, in the united states no priest is compelled to officiate a same sex wedding.
Likewise, inasmuch as weddings have societal relevance, I think they should be compelled to - or else not officiate any weddings at all.
> When you offer a service to the general public, you are in a sense attempting to provide a "plug-in" service to society as a whole, and so the terms of that service should be negotiated with society as a whole, including such things as civil rights.
Does this apply to all businesses that offer services? Keep in mind here that the first amendment, in addition to protecting our right to speech, protects our right to association. That is, our right to associate with the people, and only the people, we want to is a civil right that our constitution protects just as much as speech.
If I open a store and let people purchase things, I'm offering a service to the general public. But I'm certainly not "part of the state". One of the primary concerns about the state is that it (usually) has a monopoly on the things that it does, so that if it provides a service, it's the only provider of that service.
But "speech" isn't a service that one can monopolize. Preventing speech can be done via force, but "facilitating speech" isn't monopolizable. If someone won't let you do it, you can do it yourself or find it somewhere else.
> Yes. Nobody can be compelled to offer a service.
But you are compelling me to offer a service! I want to offer the service to paint anything except X. And you say no no! You are additionally compelled to offer the service to paint X. This by the way, gets far more complicated if, for example, my service is...baking cakes. If I offer a universal cake baking service, when can I refuse to bake a cake? Can I refuse all wedding cakes? Can I refuse all cakes above a certain size? Can I refuse all cakes in red? Can I only bake chocolate cakes? Can I refuse to bake cakes for people who have previously given me bad reviews?
> No it does not; it merely prevents them from getting married in the way that they like, which is a different way than the societal norm.
So let's make this concrete. Let's say I ban painting my name. I don't want people to paint it in my house. People can paint anything else, but not my name.
With the marriage example, we generally assume that people are attracted to a particular gender, and aren't really able to change that. Are you suggesting that, similarly, there are people who cannot find happiness without painting my name on my wall?
I mean if that's the case, why is it moral for me to ban them as long as I ban everyone else too? These particular people can't be happy either way.
With marriage, the issue is that you're essentially preventing some group from being able to openly mutually associate in the way that they want to. We can quibble on exactly how much of a freedom to associate or a human right that is, but it sure sounds like a lot more of one than your ability to write my name on my wall.
There's another argument by the way, which is that marriage is a service provided to two individuals, and that providing only heterosexual marriages discriminates based on attributes of those individuals, in exactly the same way as only marrying white people would be discriminatory. This same argument doesn't work for the example of banning speech.
Yes, I don't believe in an unrestricted right of business association.
(Neither does the US, when it comes to discrimination on protected categories.)
> If I open a store and let people purchase things, I'm offering a service to the general public. But I'm certainly not "part of the state". One of the primary concerns about the state is that it (usually) has a monopoly on the things that it does, so that if it provides a service, it's the only provider of that service.
> But "speech" isn't a service that one can monopolize. Preventing speech can be done via force, but "facilitating speech" isn't monopolizable.
Sure it is, by controlling the platform. In any case, I have a much more expansive view of monopoly as a spectrum. Network effects, for instance, can also contribute to a monopolizing service. In any case, I believe the primary reason why monopoly is a moral risk is because a monopoly prevents you from switching providers to escape a restrictive corporate environment. My approach is instead to outlaw restrictive corporate environments.
> > Yes. Nobody can be compelled to offer a service.
> But you are compelling me to offer a service!
No, you always have the choice to not offer the service at all. I am not compelling you to offer any specific service, I am preventing you from offering a service with certain restrictive parameters.
> And you say no no! You are additionally compelled to offer the service to paint X.
No, you are compelled to offer the service to paint X, contingent on your decision to offer the service at all. You always have the option to cease offering the service entirely. And you could, I guess, close your company whenever someone requests a service you don't like. However considering fees, that may be impractical.
> I mean if that's the case, why is it moral for me to ban them as long as I ban everyone else too? These particular people can't be happy either way.
I don't have an opinion on the morality of the matter. Or rather, I don't think my morality should affect the decision. That's why I have focused this conversation specifically on the mechanism by which the morality is arbitrated, which should be the same mechanism by which state decisions are arbitrated, ie. civil rights, representative democracy etc, inasmuch as the service is of the class of "service offering to the general public" shared with some state services.
The idea that companies shouldn't be given the right to business association because their civil rights are less important that the civil rights of others is a moral one.
Civil rights are always in conflict, and which ones you prioritize and how is a moral decision. You can't abdicate that responsibility.
Put another way, why does it violate civil rights to offer a service conditionally, but not to refuse to offer the service at all?
Or in the reverse, why is the government able to regulate my offering of a service conditionally, even though you seem to believe that them compelling me to offer the service in general is a violation of my rights?
Or yet another way: why do you believe that the right of association is less important than the right of speech?
Those are all ultimately moral or ethical questions.
Yes, sorry, I agree. These are all moral questions. My position can be generally summed up as "the less individual an organization is, the less weight its rights have." This is because I consider the individual as the ultimate purpose of society.
That is, the more individuals your organization serves, the more it becomes a "thing whose arbitration between individuals is of societal import". I believe that issues of societal import should be decided by democratic means, whereas issues of individual import are decided by personal choice. Between the two is a sliding scale.
I’ve come to the conclusion that there is probably no universally compelling answer to that. I think you either hold individual liberty sacred as a sort of deontological pillar, or you try to get clever about minmaxing this nebulous “society” thing I’m always hearing about, moving toward a shared utopia one “we should ban…” proposal at a time.
> why would it be bad if a government censors speech?
Its a step in the wrong direction. The next step is to forbid asking that question. Step 3 is war to get our rights back. 2 and 3 may take time. Say 6 years for 2 and 1000 years for 3.
1000 years of blaming the witches, the socialists, the unionists, the jew, the Muslim, the Chinese, the Russians and of course you!
If you were defending the governments right to censor speech you were useful in installing it. When the censorship is accepted by the masses you become someone known to publicly share an opinion about a forbidden topic. Presenting the question for others to answer the way you just did is much worse than having your own opinion.
If we allow people like that, before we know it, we have people questioning everything!
It does, governments can pass laws, big businesses can't. They may buy politicians to pass the laws for them but in the end they can't pass the laws themselves.
You really should be. Quite a few of the larger companies have been caught conspiring to manipulate wages and workplace mobility for their own gain, in ways that not only hurt every work seeking person in the affected area, but where also flat out illegal.
Then lets not ignore the fact that most countries had to make laws specifically to protect working parents. There are most likely entire warehouses filled with court cases over a business owner realizing that statistically hiring a non married replacement for the recently married employee will be better.
They wont do it out of racism, they wont do it out of religious fervor. However they will do whatever they can to make more money.
You should rwad more science fiction. From the 1960s to 80s-90s, maybe not so much nowadays. Probably because it isn't all that "far out there" any more.
Your comment was correctly downvoted and flagged because of the name-calling. You shouldn't do that, not only because it breaks the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), but because it discredits the view you're arguing for.
What would you do to combat the deliberate misinformation campaign that is weakening the US and many other countries? While propaganda and polarization are not new, the speed, reach, and aggregation are only possible with modern communication.
An early tidbit that may have been lost with deplatforming was that Euro leaders also disagreed, citing that only the state could be trusted with that power. However, the US Constitution mostly prohibits that route and it's left to private companies to make up their own minds about what content they want to host.
It's a hard problem for democracy, the best countermeasures I know of are transparency and education, but those are mitigations at best, you can't really do much if a majority of people believe an untruth.
You could also elect me as your benevolent dictator, I'll be happy to bring the misinformation to an end, but the lie I'd tackle first would be that this has anything to do with democracy.
> you can't really do much if a majority of people believe an untruth
Treat the propaganda campaign like the war it is - and arrest those who are serving as foreign actors for treason.
The earlier people are finally willing to admit Russia and China are waging a war against the whole Western world, the better.
The big multipliers - #45, Alex Jones, Fox News, Newsmax, OANN - are publicly known, as are most of the people spreading the stuff on FB, and can be taken down. No need to resolve to a surveillance state, just public information is enough.
Their motivation is self preservation. Western democracies make it pretty clear that they do not support the existence of brutal dictatorships. Thus brutal dictatorships are motivated to act in ways that can weaken the western democracies.
For China? World domination for Han Chinese, nothing less. They are taking over entire countries by "debt relief" aka loan sharking, and leaders who don't want their "investments" simply have their assets taken away by force like the Philippines.
Both can only follow through with their plans if there is no united opposition against them. Europe is falling apart on a national level with nationalist, often Russia-backed anti-democrats spreading discontent and hate, and the US is collapsing in ethnic and class war.
But if you're going down that route then why should other western governments not treat the US as a threat too? There's extensive spying going on by the US against them and there's plenty of American propaganda too. Should Europe ban Hollywood movies? Arrest American businessmen for spying? Where does it end?
I'd abolish the worst purveyors of misinformation: Namely, all of the people who are trying to censor "misinformation" so that they cannot have their propaganda challenged by an empowered public that no longer needs gatekeepers.
> What would you do to combat the deliberate misinformation campaign that is weakening the US and many other countries?
Which one? Plenty of candidates depending on which part of the political space your views lie in.
Is it the misinformation campaign that Trump won the last election? The one that says third world immigration is good? The one that says Democracy is good? The one that says COVID is harmless?
If there were some Oracle that could tell us what is true or false then this wouldn't be an issue in the first place.
If I can't explore new ideas, evaluate information and make up my own mind, no matter how much bullshit exists, I'm not living in a democratic free society anymore. I'm living in a technological dystopia, and authoritarian state.
I'm afraid, skepticism is part of a healthy democracy...no matter how much the government want me to get a jab.
When did Google feel the need to be the world police?
That’s a better question and moves the discussion forward.
Yes - and No.
To fairly answer your question, there’s different levels of sophistication to misinformation.
It ranges from vaccines will grow you another arm, to the Gates foundation is using this to impoverish nations. (I’m loosely using current examples)
So yes - experts can and will be able to avoid many of the misinformation attempts out there. The ones which they fall victim to - in their own area of expertise, are likely unavoidable.
For google to remove healthcare misinformation, they will be targeting the obvious content that has been flagged and likely supported by govts orgs.
I feel that many people are arguing about the case where the gatekeepers are wrong - which was an issue in a world where traffic through the gates was more orderly and the gatekeepers had historically been mistaken in stopping traffic.
Right now, even if I don’t like gatekeepers, I have no choice.
Someone has figured out to how to mass produce obviously and subtly malicious traffic.
The issue at this juncture in time is the lack of effective filtering.
Since we don’t have a better solution, we get forced to use gatekeeping.
This seems like a “throw the baby out with the bath water” situation in both directions: Censorship, like you note, can be used for evil to suppress anything you disagree with and drive your narrative. But unbridled amplified speech opens the possibility for destructive mass influence of minds, to be evil and destroy the good things those minds agree on.
So to me this is at least nuanced. Insisting on completely unchecked speech, however unscientific and destructive, is not a reasonable position.
But there's a difference between 'disagree' and 'state objectively false things'. The US media especially is poisoned with stuff like that - see all the lies around covid and mask wearing.
Do you feel the same way about free speech zones? Don't like what someone says, just force them to move out of the way so they end up protesting to an empty audience. Naturally if it's a big enough protest you may have to use violence (tear gas, riot police ect...) to do this but hey, they still get their right to free speech, so i guess it's all good and democratic.
There's something fundamentally flawed about trusting people to determine truths themselves as well. Doubly so when those spreading misinformation are well funded propagandists that have been attacking education for years. China, Russia, Germany, Italy, Cuba... these and other nations became communist/authoritarian with the ardent support of the people of those nations (enough people anyway). Tens of millions died as a result. People die today as a result. People are oppressed as a result.
> Companies aren't allowed to advertise rat poison as medicine and neither are you.
You may want a different example :).
> Warfarin first came into large-scale commercial use in 1948 as a rat poison. Warfarin was formally approved for human use by the US FDA to treat blood clots in 1954.
from the wording in the link[1], it seems even if you share the document with just one single person, and that person flags it, Google is then allowed to investigate. So, the pre-condition is not sharing publicly, just sharing.
> So no, this isn't applying to your private diary or privately shared documents.
Well this seems to be inaccurate based on the text cited below[1], do you have sources that back your claim? There is nothing saying that privately shared documents can't be reviewed. The only necessary condition seems to be just that someone flagged your content, which could be the one person you shared that content with.
[1] "After we are notified of a potential policy violation, we may review the content and take action, including restricting access to the content, removing the content, and limiting or terminating a user’s access to Google products".
> All our legal protections ultimately depend on a democratic foundation -- undo that with misinformation and you don't have anything anymore. Similarly, your rights don't matter much if you're dead.
This is an insane conclusion to draw, because it blithely ignores that it positions Google as an oracle of what's threatening to democracy and what isn't.
The examples in the current policy are fairly narrow, but this is a categorical line being crossed (for better or worse). Those who are concerned by the increasing encroachment of effective utilities on what can be communicated need to speak up when clear lines are crossed, because it's the only way to avoid frog-boiling.
It's funny to see people freak out about this when entire foundation of Google is built on the proposition that it can make effective judgments about the relative value of various content out there on the web.
Like, if Google has a hidden agenda here that makes it any more fundamentally compromised as a judge of disinformation than anything else, then whether or not it will be a free CDN for arbitrary content isn't remotely our biggest problem.
And if they're just that bad at sorting information from disinformation in spite of their considerable resources and ostensible value proposition, same thing goes, although that's an opportunity for someone else to the extent that there's a market for understanding reality.
So, yeah. Google by its nature is going to play a role regarding what's a threat to accurate understanding and democracy. It's not alone in this; journalism does it. The academy does it. The courts do it. Businesses do it.
The way you get a well-functioning society where robust discourse turns into better perception and refined ideas isn't that everybody takes a hands off approach, it's that everybody -- all institutions and individuals -- take responsibility.
Not to mention that requiring Google (or anyone) to carry and disseminate information that they consider irresponsible... well, compelled speech isn't exactly freedom of speech.
> Like, if Google has a hidden agenda here that makes it any more fundamentally compromised as a judge of disinformation than anything else, then whether or not it will be a free CDN for arbitrary content isn't remotely our biggest problem.
Indeed, the bias in Google Search is actually a very serious problem.
> It's funny to see people freak out about this when entire foundation of Google is built on the proposition that it can make effective judgments about the relative value of various content out there on the web.
You're thinking of Google Search, their web search product. The thread is talking about Google Drive, their file-storage and - sharing product. If you don't get the difference between these two products and the expectations around them, I don't know what to tell you.
The relevant differences between those two products are:
(a) Google is actually less uniquely powerful or threatening when it comes to the hosting segment
(b) Google has an even greater claim to moral and legal rights to say "yeah, we're gonna decide not to carry/disseminate certain content,", except to the extent that your position here involves the idea that compelled speech is the way forward.
The idea that _anyone_ can reliably enough decree what's misinformation is ludicrous. I acknowledge that there are vast masses of incredibly stupid people that need to pretend that Truth is handed down on clay tablets by God in order to function. We're much better off with the scientific establishment wearing this mantle than, say, religious institutions. And its pointless to try to convince these people that science is an iterative, incremental process that's based in skepticism, not certainty.
But the minority of society that understands and participates in the process of truth-formation (including scientists!) produces a widely disproportionate amount of epistemic value, and society depends on this process for basic functioning.
It's amazing to me that this isn't clear to everyone after the pandemic, of all things. The amount of claims that were banned from social media as "misinformation" that became expert consensus a couple of months later is mind-boggling. Following smart and quantitative people on Twitter was wayyyy more likely to provide you a healthy and safe pandemic experience than following the incoherent and self-contradictory public health recommendations (let alone policy). More important than this "direct-to-consumer" ability to discuss the pandemic is that experts themselves form their opinions through this type of discussion. The notion that there's a "someone else" who has reliably figured out which dissent is out of bounds is laughable.
I'll note again that Google's current policy is limited to fairly simple things, but it's an important Schelling fence being torn down and worthy of commenting on (and pushing back against, if yiu believe the trend is harmful).
A few years back people were getting messages from Google if their docs contained hate speech.
Google's response was that it was a corporate feature that was accidentally turned on for all accounts.
So they certainly have infrastructure to do deep content scans of all users docs. Realistically they probably do still scan all accounts for internal metrics, it's just notification that has been disabled.
I can't find anything with searching that Google ever algorithmically identified hate speech in Docs & Drive, there's no such corporate feature that can be enabled in G Suite control panel, reliably identifying hate speech is a hard problem that there's no indication of Google having solved, and honestly the entire thing sounds like an urban legend.
But if you have a reputable source I'd love to know.
> A Google spokesperson reached out via email with the following statement saying that the bug has been fixed: "This morning, we made a code push that incorrectly flagged a small percentage of Google Docs as abusive, which caused those documents to be automatically blocked. A fix is in place and all users should have full access to their docs. Protecting users from viruses, malware, and other abusive content is central to user safety. We apologize for the disruption and will put processes in place to prevent this from happening again."
I work at Google. I’m not involved with this change specifically, but suffice it to say there is far more advanced processing than simple hash checks for CSAM being run on every file uploaded to Drive. I would be surprised if all files weren’t subject to these checks, but whether or not Google will take action on them is another matter.
> undo that with misinformation and you don't have anything anymore.
That presumes that we have come from a period that was somehow free of misinformation. This is obviously false, and all we're doing is trading one corrupt system of control for another.
Democracy also demands that the burden of proof is on the accuser, don't you feel this same standard should apply to those, who of their own volition, take on the task of fighting this "misinformation?" Shouldn't those deprived have recourse?
> Companies aren't allowed to advertise rat poison as medicine and neither are you.
Advertising is always a commercial activity. If I'm merely sharing my opinion that rat poison, in some dose, might possibly serve as a cure for some particular ailment, how am I advertising? Isn't there a responsibility of the other end user to not accept medical advice from anonymous information published from a free document sharing service?
I'm not sure the trade offs you suggest are gaining us anything important.
You are assuming a professional is reading whatever the content is you are distributing and will make a rational, fair decision.
No.
It's going to be a minimum wage indentured Google servant that doesn't quite understand what they are reading but they have 17.5 seconds per case to make a decision. They will shoot first and ask questions later. What if the document is satire but they couldn't understand it? Oh well there goes one strike against your account, or maybe that's your third strike and now ALL your Google accounts are banned.
We already know what the appeals process is like. Unless you get it publicized on Hacker News et al, you won't get any chance to appeal.
Actually, this is not even about distribution exactly, but about the "Report Abuse" button: what this page lists are categories of things that, if someone with access to the file clicks on "Report Abuse", whoever is acting on those flags may decide is a violation. Note that the page says:
> After we are notified of a potential policy violation, we may review the content and take action…
So (1) it's not about Google proactively scanning all your files (even public ones: though I guess with sufficiently public files, sooner or later someone will click on "Report Abuse", perhaps even by accident), and (2) I imagine it could happen with files you shared with just your friend, if your "friend" decides to "Report Abuse".
(Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on Google Drive or anything related to these policies.)
“Democracy” and “health” are high level man-made abstractions, so they can hardly be placed at the root of anything, that's not just because of “free speech”. See how you didn't even try to use, say, “personal rights” and “personal life”; the panegyric for those who “know what's better for you” needs vague impersonal “democracy” and “health”.
Google has been doing anything it wants with people's data, news like these just mean they are lazily formalizing their power.
Who at Google do you trust to decide what information you and I are allowed to know? What is this person's qualifications?
How can they be held to account when they inevitably get it wrong?
Where will the highly-transparent write-ups detailing moderation decisions be published?
Seems like if Google actually gave a damn about the morality of censorship as some sort of 'neccessary evil' you'd be able to answer these questions easily^. Until then, it's a non-starter in my book.
This is the key problem with all censorship, however well-intentioned. A person is needed to censor. People make mistakes. Sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose. There is a strong dis-incentive to having any transparency or accountability. If there were, you might be held liable for your mistakes and nobody wants that.
To add: Who at Google listens to dissent!? No one is allowed to say anything - there is sort of a chilling effect internally at Google.
It’s debateless policies that are spreading on the world stage. People need to rise up against a small group of individuals located in Menlo Park, CA who are demonstrably and utterly out of the touch with the rest of the world, but deciding how and what information flows. These people have no idea how agriculture works or how people live in Indonesia or what conflicts are going on in Namibia.
I don't trust Google to fully filter information for it's credibility ... so I don't automatically trust things shared on Google drive.
But I don't have to trust that Google won't suppress valid positions drive since there are many alternatives for sharing information beyond Google drive, which isn't meant to primarily host public content in any case.
First, since you've been derailing thing from one question another, I have to mention that a thing shared publicly from a Google drive account is no more accessible than a thing shared from a website that a person sets themselves, so Google drive accessibly is not particular answer to social network news filtering.
But on the topic of social network news filtering, anyone who uses a social network is implicitly consenting to that network's filtering of information.
Once upon a time, most people got their news from a single newspaper - well informed people might read several papers as well as newsmagazines but even this implied a lot of filtering. Those newspapers filtered the news more heavily than any present network.
>anyone who uses a social network is implicitly consenting to that network's filtering of information.
In what way does this make censorship the morally right thing to do? Think of all the evil large corporations have tried to justify with statements like that^ over the years.
"Our billions of users should have known we were gonna pull the wool over their eyes!"
I think the point here is that these are private businesses, and their platforms are private property. The liberty to choose what you do with your property overrides any responsibility to do the "morally right" thing, whatever that actually is.
I don’t want a cloud storage provider with only private storage. If I have a library of book files I want to share it with my spouse and if Google is trying to filter out misinform and not let me distribute it to my spouse, that’s bad.
I think we’ll have augmented intelligence through computing soon and imagine how horrific it will be if Google says “you can think misinfo, we just won’t let you think it?”
That’s bad. Storing, creating, and distributing don’t need limits like this.
Asimov’s three laws were possible and they still had issues. Imagine having a law for robots that they couldn’t speak what Google thought is misinfo.
Your message implies that you trust that Google will use this message in a clean way. They won't; they have a history of using algorithms to detect TOS abuses in a very Gung-ho way without any sort of functional appeal process.
I take rat poison as medicine--warfarin, just in much smaller doses than the rats get.
For that matter, the most toxic substance known to man, botulism toxin, is being promoted for various medical and cosmetic uses.
>> it's not about private files, it's about distributing content
The distinction between private files and distributed content is blurred-2-nonexistent, and Google Drive is not a neutral player in that process. The whole premise is that these are just sharing settings.
The premise of this service is that controlling your own files is passe, because content distribution, creation, consumption and need to work seamlessly.
Also, this isn't outside of the greater Alphabet complex. Even in social media, where they are a secondary player, they own Youtube... also premised on the sharing and distributing model.
I don't even use google, except I have a youtube login, and many friends I correspond with use gmail. In the present surveillance regime we can experience, through the medium of digital communications, the myth of the Evil Eye and the fear of being watched with bad intention.
> All our legal protections ultimately depend on a democratic foundation
is the wrong way round. I suspect you're speaking from a US perspective. The US constitution limits the rights of goverment for the benefit of the people, it does not limit the rights of the people for the benefit of government.
>Google isn't spying on your private files, but does scan them when you share them publicly.
What's more likely:
A) That they make a single-pass scan over a file for various purposes
B) They make multiple, separate scans over a file at different times depending on sharing status and other factors
I'd contend that it's more likely to be A, and that it almost certainly happens as soon as the data becomes visible to Google. I'd be very surprised if they didn't scan immediately to de-dupe and detect illegal pornography, for example. Once that's a given, it doesn't make much sense to do a separate kind of scanning later based on a different set of criteria; You scan once and flag for the respective detections immediately.
Mao in 1956: let a hundred flowers bloom ... Mao a year later: but watch out for the weeds. In those days the CPC apparently also has had a change in their 'terms and conditions'.
First, it's not about private files, it's about distributing content.
Google isn't spying on your private files, but does scan them when you share them publicly. E.g. keep all the pirated movies you want on your Drive, and even give private access to friends, but the moment you make them publicly viewable Google scans them and limits access accordingly. So no, this isn't applying to your private diary or privately shared documents.
And second, to those who claim absolute free speech with no limits -- notice that the two main categories here are related to democracy and health. All our legal protections ultimately depend on a democratic foundation -- undo that with misinformation and you don't have anything anymore. Similarly, your rights don't matter much if you're dead. Companies aren't allowed to advertise rat poison as medicine and neither are you.