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Google is now applying its coronavirus misinformation policies to personal files

reclaimthenet.org

91–100 of 229 posts

Re: Google is now applying its coronavirus misinformation policies to personal files

#91
post #5

This is crossing a very bad line, and is absolutely unacceptable. My company of about 50 people on G-Suite will be canceling our subscription and moving to Office 365 within the next three months. We had discussed it in the past due to their history of flagrant disregard for the security and privacy standards we require, but this has galvanized the conversation and we're prioritizing it on the near-term now. I'm sure…

You gotta fight! For your right! To misssssleeeeead.

It might be more prudent to be careful about accepting what you read at first glance; why would google allow someone to stream data (against policy for the product), let alone when that content violates their policies on their content streaming networks? Do you think they should leave up public to other content that violates their policies, just because it's tied to a private account?

Re: Google is now applying its coronavirus misinformation policies to personal files

#92
post #81
post #52

Similar news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16668267 What I learned from that post is that as soon as you start share your file, it's no longer a private file and stricter guideline/requirement applies. This is also indicated from the TOS: > Files in your individual drive are private, until you decide to share them.

Yes, it turns out the the web is not, in fact, a giant virtual seastead unbothered by the norms and rules of society. If you distribute information via computer networks it will be subject to scrutiny to see if it is malware, copyrighted by someone else, exploitative, seditious, etc.

It's disingenuous to conflate Alphabet Corporation's political strategies with "the norms and rules of society".

Re: Google is now applying its coronavirus misinformation policies to personal files

#93
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble is where do they draw the line. Say I share a pamphlet about how Jesus reclaims humanity from the corruption of sin. If Google thinks all Christians are superstitious bumpkins, does that give them the right to remove my public share?

The line will be drawn arbitrarily and inconsistently, which might not be as bad as it sounds. There will always be some content that just has to be banned. No moderation will ever get the rules & the line exactly right, but they can be close enough to reasonable. The consequences matter. Losing private access to a file is quite bad, but Google deciding they don't want to help you publicly share something is a bit di…

> There will always be some content that just has to be banned.

No there won't; there will be content that special interest groups want banned, and must be prevented from getting banned. Eg child molesters wanting video evidence of their crimes banned.

Re: Google is now applying its coronavirus misinformation policies to personal files

#94

Censoring is a losing battle. Because it attacks a symptom. The cure for ignorance is not trying to hide missinformation (that just empowers the spreaders, gives it credence (they wouldn't bother suppressing it if it weren't true), or drives it into dark places you can no longer detect how much of a problem it is). The cure is to educate people and teach them critical thinking (both of which are expensive and honestl…

What's to be done, then, before we reach sufficient education and critical thinking skills? I mean, that's kind of a boil-the-ocean solution, as you observe. When Trump suggested that ingesting bleach could cure COVID-19, 30 people in NY state were hospitalized the next day for drinking bleach.

Saying "we should all be sufficiently educated and critical thinkers that misinformation is harmless" is effectively no solution at all. What do we do NOW?

Re: Google is now applying its coronavirus misinformation policies to personal files

#95
post #80

This might be the relevant section in the Terms of Service: Public streaming Drive allows you to store, share, and stream video content, but should not be used as a replacement for a content distribution network. For large-scale public streaming, YouTube is a better fit. Drive will restrict usage when it appears that it's being used for large-scale public streaming. Repeated violations may result in additional action…

> Drive will restrict usage... > ... including terminating your account or ability to use Drive. I think that the controversial part is that the file was deleted. I'd find it surprising if some file from my Drive is just deleted instead of restricting public access or using another form of enforcing the policy.

Google has no obligation to be anyone's mouthpiece or loudspeaker, and we have no information on whether any files were deleted.

Re: Google is now applying its coronavirus misinformation policies to personal files

#96
post #94

Censoring is a losing battle. Because it attacks a symptom. The cure for ignorance is not trying to hide missinformation (that just empowers the spreaders, gives it credence (they wouldn't bother suppressing it if it weren't true), or drives it into dark places you can no longer detect how much of a problem it is). The cure is to educate people and teach them critical thinking (both of which are expensive and honestl…

What's to be done, then, before we reach sufficient education and critical thinking skills? I mean, that's kind of a boil-the-ocean solution, as you observe. When Trump suggested that ingesting bleach could cure COVID-19, 30 people in NY state were hospitalized the next day for drinking bleach. Saying "we should all be sufficiently educated and critical thinkers that misinformation is harmless" is effectively no solu…

> When Trump suggested that ingesting bleach could cure COVID-19, 30 people in NY state were hospitalized the next day for drinking bleach.

You have a point in general, but that specific example sounds like natural selection doing a good job.

Re: Google is now applying its coronavirus misinformation policies to personal files

#98

does anyone know who the people behind the reclaimthenet.org domain are? The headline seems intentionally misleading and the entire article is biased, as seems to be the case for most of the site, almost exlcusively focussing on censorship of fringe figures out of conspiracy and far-right political circles. There is no reference to organisations, writers or editors anywhere on this site if I'm not missing anything.

If it's hard to find out who is funding a campaign, it's a pretty good bet it's malicious disinfo.

Re: Google is now applying its coronavirus misinformation policies to personal files

#99
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future is all about self hosting and/or peer to peer technology not controlled by a central authority.

Unfortunately, I have to believe the opposite, even if I wish it wasn't true. People don't want to maintain a server, look after backups, deal with software updates, legal stuff, blacklists, ddos attacks, .... it never ends. People want to create some content, publish it and be done. This directly drives the future to externalizing these things to other companies. Distance isn't an issue, economies of scale are huge.…

> Self hosting

It isn't just "hosting" that's the issue, it's "publishing".

You can buy "hosting" for a few dollars a month from lots of companies. But that just gives you a place to park files. There's still a lot of other things you need to get to the point of "create some content, publish it and be done", which you correctly say is what people want, and "hosting" does not include all those things.

Various hosting providers will also sell you "publishing" or "content management" services of various types, but none of them are as easy to use as "edit my document on Google Drive" (or even, for that matter, "edit my markdown file and git push to my public repo on github", which is the techie version of "edit my document on Google Drive"), which is why virtually nobody uses them.

However, that doesn't necessarily mean we're doomed to a few oligopolies controlling everything that gets published. First, even if less than 1% of the population is able and willing to do the extra work to publish on their own site independently of the oligopolies (as you do, and as I do too), that's still not nothing. And we can still send links to our own sites via email, facebook, twitter, etc.

Second, while the oligopolies currently provide self-publishing capabilities that are easier to use than anything else, that's still not their primary business model; the only reason they provide them is to corral more users into their walled gardens so they can sell more ads. Since it's not their primary business model, they are vulnerable to disruption from someone for whom providing self-publishing capabilities is their primary business model. (Of course, to say this could happen is not to say it will happen, or that it's easy.)

Re: Google is now applying its coronavirus misinformation policies to personal files

#100
post #81
post #52

Similar news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16668267 What I learned from that post is that as soon as you start share your file, it's no longer a private file and stricter guideline/requirement applies. This is also indicated from the TOS: > Files in your individual drive are private, until you decide to share them.

Yes, it turns out the the web is not, in fact, a giant virtual seastead unbothered by the norms and rules of society. If you distribute information via computer networks it will be subject to scrutiny to see if it is malware, copyrighted by someone else, exploitative, seditious, etc.

Or someone deems it "misinformation", whatever that means.
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