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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”

#71

Post by adventured »

fzeroracer wrote: post #53
evilturnip wrote: post #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.

Just because a belief is civilly expressed does not make it less harmful. For example: people casually believing that the Sandy Hook shooting was a conspiracy drummed up by the government is actively harmful to the families affected by that tragedy. What do you say to those people? How do you solve that problem? And how do you define 'civil'? Because different platforms have different ranges of civility as well.

> What do you say to those people? How do you solve that problem?

That's not a problem that needs to be "solved." It's not necessary to force everyone to think alike, or believe the same things. It's not necessary - or desirable - to try to force everyone to never think/believe mean things or unhappy thoughts.

It's similar to saying: how do you solve people that believe in ghosts or god or unicorns (particularly if you're an atheist and believe that's all bunk). Consider hardcore religious people that believe most people are going to burn in hell, and or they believe that most dead people are in hell. Now ask the same question: isn't that offensive to those people that are going to supposedly burn? Isn't it offensive to the memory of the dead? Solve what, that people are allowed to believe what they want to (including offensive things)? The censorship it would require to constrain all of it would be horrific, authoritarian to the nth degree.

The world didn't end because of all the 9/11 conspiracy theories. Thousands of people died in those attacks. Yet the conspiracy theorists proclaimed that a plane never hit the Pentagon, that there were no people on the plane that crashed in PA, that all the Jews stayed home that day, and so on. That doesn't need solving, people will never stop believing and saying crazy things, you can't force it to end.

As longer duration examples, JFK and the moon landing conspiracies persist five decades on, and will never cease to exist. If NASA couldn't solve that with 50 years of education and the extraordinary amount of evidence they've provided, what hope is there for the other items.

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

#72

Post by [deleted] »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #67

Slide 66 is particularly interesting, and articulates an observation that I've made: > Tech firms are performing a balancing act between two incompatible positions > 100% commit to the American tradition that prioritises free speech for democracy, not civility > 100% commit to the European tradition that favors dignity over liberty, and civility over freedom It is a very American view that unrestricted freedom of spe…

[deleted]

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

#73

Post by bzbarsky »

Kaveren wrote: post #59
beaner wrote: post #17

HN seems super strongly opposed to Google providing censorship in China. Do they feel the same way about Google applying it to the rest of the world?

There's a strong difference between state mandated censorship and a company voluntarily censoring content on their platform. A company has the absolute right to prohibit any content on their platform that they so choose. There's freedom not to use Google services. Calls to regulate independent companies are purely ludicrous. If Facebook said tomorrow that any positive mention of, say, Paul Graham, would result in imm…

> There's freedom not to use Google services.

Using Google services is now required by many public schools in the US. That's where all the homework is posted, for example. Now in the US there's freedom to not attend public school, of course, so technically you have the right to not use Google services. But in practice the vast majority of people would not be able to exercise that right in this case.

Similarly, a number of schools are starting to do communications with parents purely through Facebook. And I expect this trend will keep getting worse before it gets better.

> Calls to regulate independent companies are purely ludicrous.

If they're really independent companies, yes. If they're government-sponsored monopolies, on the other hand, the calculus is quite different. And we're quite close to that line, if not over it.

You could argue that the right solution is for governments to not enshrine these companies in these monopoly positions. That would be lovely, obviously. Too bad the companies are spending all this money to get into those positions (see Google Classroom).

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

#74

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mellow-lake-day wrote: post #44
evilturnip wrote: post #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.

I'm speaking for myself here but I think the Russian bots as well as astroturfing bots need to be censored. And not censored by government regulation but by the terms of service. There are many "active measure" Russian bots active on twitter. Twitter doesn't seem concerned at all mostly because those Russian bots are padding their numbers same goes for FB and reddit.

Spam filtering isn't censorship. It's not censorship when the recipient doesn't want the message. And botspam is spam.

The difference is when you have a message that some of the actual human recipients actually want. Then it isn't spam, it's just information some people disagree with.

If you don't like what someone has to say, don't listen to them. But you have no right to tell someone else they can't.

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

#75

Post by Karunamon »

fzeroracer wrote: post #68
evilturnip wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are thousands of conspiracies floating around. Should we consider them all harmful and ban them? Who decides when a conspiracy becomes harmful? Should we ban flat-earthers from posting their views? After all, if everyone believed it, we would set science back countless centuries. The way to combat false ideas is with truth; a culture that is always searching for the truth. That can only be facilitated by unhind…

Do you consider American culture to be one of the more free ones? If so, then why do these conspiracies exist? Why have flat-earth conspiracies and anti-scientific dogma thrived? Why do we have a president that outright denies scientific fact? If combating false ideas with truth worked, then surely these problems shouldn't exist in America, the land of the free. In the arena of free speech, only the values with the m…

This is the paradox of tolerance. We can say that unhindered speech is the way of countering harmful speech, but then I ask you: What led to the rise of such harmful speech today?

You point at anti-science conspiracy theories as a failing of free speech, and you're probably right, but what would you have us do otherwise? A world in which some central authority dictates that certain opinions are never allowed to be expressed, to me, seems like an absolutely horrible place to live, even if it meant that antivaxxers couldn't spread their crap anymore.

Furthermore, there is no such thing as a perfect political system. It's not enough to point at what free speech fails at, you also need to suggest what we should be doing instead, and how the failings of that system wouldn't be worse.

It's a pretty good comparison to democracy, in my mind. It's the worst system ever invented, except for all of the other ones we've tried.

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

#76

Post by shittyadmin »

adventured wrote: post #48
shittyadmin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, honestly I don't think Breitbart and similar can really play this as negative for Google when it acknowledges many actions have been taken even against right wingers unfairly and encourages "Don't take sides" as a top point. The biggest thing to complain about would probably be the title... they couldn't have picked a worse title.

There's a larger question that Breitbart is raising: should we tolerate Google - or any company - as a monopolist with censorship power over information distribution. In this case, they're an extraordinarily powerful, expansive monopolist at that. Who decides the degree to which they censor, who gets censored, what information gets censored, etc. Google isn't just a company policing its own platform. Imagine Microsof…

I was going to say that they're not really doing it on Android, but then I remembered that both Apple and Google banned the free speech absolutist social network Gab's official app.

At least on Android you can still install it without Google's consent if you so choose. Overall though what you're saying still has more validity to it than I'd like to admit.

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

#77

Post by chrisco255 »

evilturnip wrote: post #49
eksemplar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What both sides though? The alt-right isn’t in opposition to anything mainstream, they are anti-democratic and should be treated the same way antifa, farc, isis and others are. Every time democracy fails to shut down movements like the alt-right, things end badly for democracy itself. The most used throve is stuff like nazism and fascism, but history actually have a lot of better examples. Because both Napoleon and C…

The problem is that then you have to decide what's 'anti-democratic'. You won't find 50 opinions that differ from your own. On top of that, it can then be used as justification to censor almost anything you don't like. Sure, right now you'll think there is a clear criteria. But in 25, 50, or 100 years from now, people could have easily twisted it to mean whatever they disagree with.

This. In some ways, we sort of see that with the PC movement itself. Like when people attacked Scott Kelly for quoting Winston Churchill, the OG anti-fascist, who opposed real life fascists, for God's sake: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45789819

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

#78

Post by YouOkOrNot »

It's ironic that Wikipedia has a 'Censorship by Google' article that would benefit from the addition of a paragraph or two about this memo, but due to Wikipedia's censorship of Breitbart as a source and Breitbart being the source on this, that won't happen.

It's a shame when legitimate journalism is stifled by censorship.

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

#79

Post by fzeroracer »

adventured wrote: post #71
fzeroracer wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because a belief is civilly expressed does not make it less harmful. For example: people casually believing that the Sandy Hook shooting was a conspiracy drummed up by the government is actively harmful to the families affected by that tragedy. What do you say to those people? How do you solve that problem? And how do you define 'civil'? Because different platforms have different ranges of civility as well.

> What do you say to those people? How do you solve that problem? That's not a problem that needs to be "solved." It's not necessary to force everyone to think alike, or believe the same things. It's not necessary - or desirable - to try to force everyone to never think/believe mean things or unhappy thoughts. It's similar to saying: how do you solve people that believe in ghosts or god or unicorns (particularly if y…

Okay, now let's apply your example to something a bit more violent. People that believe black people are sub-human and deserve less rights.

At what point do we no longer tolerate their opinions? For example, would you believe it's bad for someone to be censored on HN because they talked about how much they hated black coders? At a certain point we deemed as a society that those sort of views are considered bad. Do you think that was a mistake?

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

#80

Post by ryandrake »

evilturnip wrote: post #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.

> "Everybody wants to censor what they don't like."

This should be top comment on all HN discussions involving content moderation, so people can read it before they respond and think about whether what they are advocating makes sense. People these days so effortlessly are able to make that huge leap from "I don't personally like this thing" to "This thing must be suppressed/illegal for everyone."

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