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Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

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Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#721

Post by [deleted] »

orclev wrote: post #220
valvar wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't get that logic. Of course, everyone agrees that hate speech is bad (and so are a lot of things, but I digress). But how is it not censorship when one of the world's most powerful companies does it? Do they get a free pass because they are governed by shareholders and make a lot of money? I can see how it's not censorship if Bob does not want people to post things he disagrees with on his cat picture fo…

It's a question of what is meant by the term censorship. In the strictest sense, moderation and censorship are very often the same thing. If for instance, I post something terrible in a comment on here, and the administration of HN deletes that comment, then that's censorship. However, when most people talk about censorship they're using it not in the strict sense, but rather as a shorthand for someone violating thei…

[deleted]

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#722

Post by mynameismonkey »

saghm wrote: post #539
retpirato wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Google know this unless they have some access to the databases of each of those sites/instances? Why would google have that kind of access?

Couldn't this get done as part of the manual review of an app's source code? It seems like this wouldn't necessarily have to be automated

And right after that we can remove any FTP client that uses the FTP protocol to download content Google doesn't like. We should scan all apps that use a common, published protocol to make sure the protocol is not being used to consume objectionable content. /s

The app is not the service; the protocol is not the platform.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#723

Post by renewiltord »

gilrain wrote: post #92
grahoho wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reminder that F-Droid banned Gab from their store. https://reclaimthenet.org/f-droid-bans-gab-app/

A reminder that Gab is not a gray area edgecase, but a purpose-built platform for conspiracies and hate speech.

Okay come on. This sequence of comments is funny, you have to admit.

"Google is censoring apps"

"It's because those apps can access hate speech"

"You can use this other app store"

"They ban this app, though"

"But that's because it's for hate speech"

Come on, this is peak comedy.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#724

Post by spaced-out »

young_unixer wrote: post #691
throwaway189262 wrote: post #176

There's racist stuff all over Google's biggest properties. Racist results on Google, videos on youtube, sites hosted on GCP. Give me a break with your fake trashy virtue signalling Google. This is nothing more than a monopoly stomping out a platform it doesn't like. Probably because federation is a threat to Google's position as the central hub of the internet.

> This is nothing more than a monopoly stomping out a platform it doesn't like. Probably because federation is a threat to Google's position as the central hub of the internet. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. The real reason is that Google employees live in an ideological echo chamber where censoring anything that doesn't align with their ideologies is a completely normal th…

>They think they're protecting the world from bad ideas, without noticing how they themselves promote other bad ideas.

They, being Google executives, are only thinking of the company's bottom line when they make these decisions.

Don't underestimate the impact of a few thousand (or more) Rose Twitter users spamming a companies marketing page. That company goes to Google and says "make this stop, I don't care how", then Google execs decide who they want to piss off, which is generally the people paying them the least amount of money.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#725

Post by betterunix2 »

frank2 wrote: post #659
betterunix2 wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By having more than a middle school understanding of what "free speech" is about. There is no "original idea" of free speech, there never has been, it is a concept that is used to refer to a wide variety of legal frameworks across different times and places. In Germany a person's free speech rights do not include holocaust denial. For most of the history of the United States free speech has been more limited than it…

>it was not all that long ago that we had the "equal time" rule that required media outlets to host both liberal and conservative commentary That only ever applied to broadcast media (and maybe only to prime-time TV). Publishers of the written word have never been required by the US government to grant equal time. >For most of the history of the United States free speech has been more limited than it is today I don't…

A century ago in the United States the phrase "shouting fire in a crowded theater" was used in a Supreme Court ruling upholding the censorship of anti-draft activists during World War I, and within living memory the United States had various laws censoring pornographic photos and videos. There was even a time when it was illegal to have the Post Office carry written information about contraception:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws

Just a decade ago free speech rights were expanded to include corporations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Ele...

In case anyone tries to claim that the founders intended for the most expansive possible understanding of freedom of speech, the fact is that one of the earliest laws passed in the United States was a law that censored criticisms of the Federal government (in an attempt to crack down on foreign misinformation campaigns):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#726

Post by Animats »

intended wrote: post #714
Animats wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also wouldn't stand. Something like this would be too contradictory to the moral concept of free speech. I don't know. If Google decided to censor "hate speech" in GMail, could anyone stop them? Some people would applaud. Machine learning is good enough now that misspellings and euphemisms can be caught. So topic-based censorship could really work. Especially for Google, which has so much history on each sender, a…

Hey! I'm fiddling around with this right now for a submission. What I've found so far makes it look like hate speech is not easy to catch: 1) Slang evolves. 2) Combining two languages, especially under-resourced languages, mean that a chunk of words fall outside the range of a hate-speech lexicon. So maybe in languages which have huge resources devoted to it (English), its easy to figure out, but I don't know how wel…

Facebook is working on this.[1] There's even a $100,000 "Hateful Memes" competition.[2]

In order for AI to become a more effective tool for detecting hate speech, it must be able to understand content the way people do: holistically. When viewing a meme, for example, we don’t think about the words and photo independently of each other; we understand the combined meaning. This is extremely challenging for machines, however, because it means they can’t analyze the text and the image separately. They must combine these different modalities and understand how the meaning changes when they are presented together.

Facebook is going for the really hard case, where non-hate images and non-hate text combine to induce hate. They already have a text-only system.

[1] https://venturebeat.com/2020/05/12/facebook-is-using-more-ai...

[2] https://ai.facebook.com/tools/hatefulmemes/

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#728

Post by Retric »

nybble41 wrote: post #564
SkyBelow wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>under some interpretation This would imply there are interpretations where it isn't allowed even in the cases of the worst most extreme content. Does any organization/group advocate such an interpretation? As far as I'm aware all groups either support an interpretation that allows the government to censor some speech or supports considering some speech as not counting as speech so it can be censored without censorin…

> This would imply there are interpretations where it isn't allowed even in the cases of the worst most extreme content. That would be the interpretation where someone actually reads the text of the Constitution instead of making up exceptions out of whole cloth. > Does any organization/group advocate such an interpretation? Yes, obviously. The Libertarian Party is one example: >> … we oppose all attempts by governme…

The issue is what is classified as free speech? Perjury for example might not seem like a free speech issue, but under the most extreme versions it must be allowed.

As such it’s common for groups to carve out what the want limited as simply not qualifying as speech. Aka we can ban spam because we are banning the medium and not the message. This then gets into issues like should flag burning be allowed which blur the line between message and medium. Thus simply saying you support free speech is a rather meaningless statement. People need to look at the specifics on what each group considers speech etc.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#729

Post by monadic2 »

ardy42 wrote: post #603
arianvanp wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. You need to explicitly connect in most fediverse apps. They're like browsers

> No. You need to explicitly connect in most fediverse apps. They're like browsers It's pretty egregious to ban an app like that. Still, I wonder if an innocuous default server (or set of them) might smooth things over with Google. That would increase the friction of accessing the content they don't like. Android's also relatively open, so if they only have issues with specific servers, maybe the app could just drop…

Appeasement isn't a good option here either when the ban is irrational at face value to begin with.

Re: Google is apparently taking down all/most Fediverse apps from the Play Store

#730

Post by ethanwillis »

failuser wrote: post #654
john_moscow wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I can tell you what's bugging me personally about this. There's a growing divide in our society between the "equal opportunity" and "equal outcome" camps. And while the "equal opportunity" people mostly have the "just let me grill" attitude, "equal outcomers" are pushing increasingly harder, while doing their best to silence any opposing voices. It's now getting to a point where raising one's kids to be proud o…

Soviet Union was never about equal outcome. It was proclaimed, but worked around in every way possible. Jews were limited in access to education, ex-nobility was limited in rights, the party members were given all kinds of preferential treatment and nomenklatura living in relative luxury while the peasants were starving. Hey, even the city dwellers were privileged compared to peasants who were tied to the land and re…

I think this is the point. It's not going to work out here either, but it will still be proclaimed.
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