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Leaked Google briefing, admitting a “shift towards censorship”

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Re: Leaked Google briefing, admitting a “shift towards censorship”

#11

The watermark makes it really annoying to read, but unless it gets refuted by Google, it has to be real, right? (That's how these things work these days...?)

Why would it be real when it was leaked by breitbart? Are the lizard people also real? Is the earth flat? Do vaccines cause autism?

Re: Leaked Google briefing, admitting a “shift towards censorship”

#12
post #3

The watermark makes it really annoying to read, but unless it gets refuted by Google, it has to be real, right? (That's how these things work these days...?)

The Breitbart watermark makes me very suspicious, I would treat it as probably worthless until we see more reliable sources.

Why? It's no different from the logo on a TV network news video feed. It's just a news agency trying to make things painful for competitors trying to steal a story without credit.

If not for Breitbart being censored (fitting this story...) by Hacker News, the original article might have been linked:

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/10/09/the-good-censor-le...

Re: Leaked Google briefing, admitting a “shift towards censorship”

#13
I'm actually glad to see the conclusion. Everybody wants to censor what they don't like. There are people who believe free speech is not the ultimate value, but rather to protect people from 'harm'. In this case 'harm' being ideas they don't agree with.

The best stance is not to take a side, but to make sure both sides are civil in the expression of their beliefs.

Re: Leaked Google briefing, admitting a “shift towards censorship”

#14
post #6

Today I learnt OogleBot is ignoring the robots.txt file on my private Gitea server: git[dot]habd.as/robots.txt A quick search for "after dark habdas" reveals the second of two rules in the robots file, which explicitly blocks Oogle at the site root, is clearly being ignored. Of course I created this rule before putting this server online and Andex is the only webmaster console I registered this site with. But that's…

You're doing it wrong, not Google: You're blocking the wrong bot user agent. You want "Googlebot", not "Google". Google documents this...

Re: Leaked Google briefing, admitting a “shift towards censorship”

#19

I'm actually glad to see the conclusion. Everybody wants to censor what they don't like. There are people who believe free speech is not the ultimate value, but rather to protect people from 'harm'. In this case 'harm' being ideas they don't agree with. The best stance is not to take a side, but to make sure both sides are civil in the expression of their beliefs.

>The best stance is not to take a side, but to make sure both sides are civil in the expression of their beliefs.

I agree with that. It would help if these companies stopped seeking "virality" and "eyeballs" or whatever metaphor you want to use of user engagement and "notoriety/reward".

Otherwise, this is exactly the same argument China's (or Russia's) censors would make. Absolutely not different in any way.

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