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.
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.