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As opposed to all the other media in China that will show you those events? It's hardly "Google Censorship", it's Chinese law that Google follows. Just like DMC

As opposed to all the other media in China that will show you those events? It's hardly "Google Censorship", it's Chinese law that Google follows. Just like DMCA takedown requests in the US.

deleted 9y ago
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- ataturk 9y ago
  Google would be more than pleased to apply Chinese-level censorship to all nations. They wouldn't even think twice about it. All our Internet traffic is being watched, all of it. Let that sink in. All our phone calls, too. ALL. Now, these companies are stacking the deck against contrarian voices. Just going to shut anyone up who dares speak against the party line, I guess. Call them 'Russian bots' and dismiss them as irrelevant. You all rail against fascism, but I ask you: What is it called when government and private industry conspire to destroy individual freedom?
noxToken 9y ago
I just thought of something in regards to following local law. This is mostly rhetoric. There are people in support of companies fighting and breaking current law if they feel that a certain law does not serve the people. We have censorship in this case. Google is massive company with a ubiquitous name synonymous for web search. What if Google complies with local law without pushback, because they understand that a lot of people would be lost without their service. Hear me out: Most every user here and probably most people 40 or younger from developed nations understands that Google is a company name. However, I claim (no citation) that a non-trivial portion of the world population thinks that the only place to do a web search is Google's website/search bar. I further claim that a non-trivial amount of people do not know that they could navigate a browser to Wikipedia by going to wikipedia.org rather than by typing wikipedia in the bar, loading search results, and clicking the direct link. Ergo Google being shut down in country would mean that a non-trivial portion of that country's population would think that there is no way to search the web for information. It would also mean that a segment of that userbase would also think that the entirety of the Internet is broken.
candu 9y ago
This raises the age-old debate about what is good / right vs. what is legal, and how they are not usually the same thing. Without going full Godwin's Law here: history is full of cases where "following the laws" has led to systems and behavior that most people would now consider appalling. I personally think it is always reasonable to ask: at what point does following the law itself become immoral? There's no clear answer to this, of course. Chinese censorship and DMCA takedown requests fall far short of genocide, slavery, war atrocities, etc. on the "yeah, let's not do this" scale. Censorship sits in a murky area of ethics / morality. After all: we censor things like child pornography that we consider to be morally offensive, and most Western democracies have much stronger hate speech laws than the US. (There's a similar "murky area" line of reasoning around DMCA takedown requests: what about fair use? What is lost when regulatory capture prevents materials from entering the public domain on any kind of reasonable time scale? etc.)

As opposed to all the other media in China that will show you those events? It's hardly "Google Censorship", it's Chinese law that Google follows. Just like DMCA takedown requests in the US.

deleted 9y ago

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ataturk 9y ago
Google would be more than pleased to apply Chinese-level censorship to all nations. They wouldn't even think twice about it. All our Internet traffic is being watched, all of it. Let that sink in. All our phone calls, too. ALL. Now, these companies are stacking the deck against contrarian voices. Just going to shut anyone up who dares speak against the party line, I guess. Call them 'Russian bots' and dismiss them as irrelevant. You all rail against fascism, but I ask you: What is it called when government and private industry conspire to destroy individual freedom?

noxToken 9y ago

I just thought of something in regards to following local law. This is mostly rhetoric. There are people in support of companies fighting and breaking current law if they feel that a certain law does not serve the people. We have censorship in this case. Google is massive company with a ubiquitous name synonymous for web search. What if Google complies with local law without pushback, because they understand that a lot of people would be lost without their service. Hear me out: Most every user here and probably most people 40 or younger from developed nations understands that Google is a company name. However, I claim (no citation) that a non-trivial portion of the world population thinks that the only place to do a web search is Google's website/search bar. I further claim that a non-trivial amount of people do not know that they could navigate a browser to Wikipedia by going to wikipedia.org rather than by typing wikipedia in the bar, loading search results, and clicking the direct link. Ergo Google being shut down in country would mean that a non-trivial portion of that country's population would think that there is no way to search the web for information. It would also mean that a segment of that userbase would also think that the entirety of the Internet is broken.

candu 9y ago

This raises the age-old debate about what is good / right vs. what is legal, and how they are not usually the same thing. Without going full Godwin's Law here: history is full of cases where "following the laws" has led to systems and behavior that most people would now consider appalling. I personally think it is always reasonable to ask: at what point does following the law itself become immoral? There's no clear answer to this, of course. Chinese censorship and DMCA takedown requests fall far short of genocide, slavery, war atrocities, etc. on the "yeah, let's not do this" scale. Censorship sits in a murky area of ethics / morality. After all: we censor things like child pornography that we consider to be morally offensive, and most Western democracies have much stronger hate speech laws than the US. (There's a similar "murky area" line of reasoning around DMCA takedown requests: what about fair use? What is lost when regulatory capture prevents materials from entering the public domain on any kind of reasonable time scale? etc.)