5 ms·

> You won't help human rights in China by refusing to work there. Maybe so, but you definitely can hurt human rights by working there. I would say providing c

by 394549 8y ago

> You won't help human rights in China by refusing to work there. Maybe so, but you definitely can hurt human rights by working there. I would say providing censored search results (and putting an American stamp of approval on them) is hurting human rights there. Furthermore, giving an authoritarian government economic leverage over an American search engine company can hurt human rights here.

ElBarto 8y ago
This is China. Search results are censored and people are fully aware of that. This is a storm in a tea cup, but it shows that the US feel increasingly insecure when it comes to China.
- WalterSear 8y ago
  Aware or not, they are still being manipulated. 25 years after Tiananmen, most Chinese university students have never heard of it https://www.vox.com/2014/6/3/5775918/25-years-after-tiananmen-most-chinese-univeristy-students-have-never https://www.vox.com/2014/6/3/5775918/25-years-after-tiananme...
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    Lots of stuff gets swept under the rug. I received 13 years of USA primary and secondary education, and I've traveled in the Philippines. Despite that, I didn't learn until earlier this week that USA soldiers had killed hundreds of thousands of Filipinos at the turn of the century.
    - WalterSear 8y ago
      That wasn't something that was done by people still alive and in power.
      - jessaustin 8y ago
        It's true that very few USA officials have been in office for 120 years. I'm not sure why that matters? USA actions during and after the Philippine-American War aren't substantially different than our actions in several subsequent wars. Although lots of Americans disagreed with it at the time, there's only enough room in the library for so many Mark Twain books. As these things do, pretty soon it all took on a sort of awful momentum, and then talking about it was pointless. McKinley himself played it off as just a tragic circumstance: "If old Dewey had just sailed away when he smashed that Spanish fleet, what a lot of trouble he would have saved us." "Gosh, if only we had known there were no WMDs!" Nothing about the Philippine-American War made it into any history book ever assigned to any student in USA, just as nothing about the liars who killed 600,000 Iraqis ever will. Aware or not, we are still being manipulated.
        WalterSear 8y ago
        These are fair points, but don't address the fact that nobody is trying to hide the Iraq war from the internet.
        jessaustin 8y ago
        I read lots of articles about Meuller, but none of them mention his testimony in support of the Iraq War.
- 394549 8y ago
  > This is China. Search results are censored and people are fully aware of that. Having Google censor results could create the false impression that search results are censored similarly in the US as well.
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    ...false... Maybe we can trust Google not to hide stuff from us, but how come the following bullshit is all over Youtube? "teleSUR is funded in whole or in part by the Latin American government" [0] First of all, that warning doesn't even make sense. "The Latin American government"? Who's the president in that government? Maybe they have a king? Is that government less reliable than the USA government? Do they fight as many wars? Does the USA government fund any part of any media sources? More importantly, now that this sort of pathetic annotation has started, wouldn't we expect it to increase? If Alphabet require a complete accounting of all income sources for all video posters, they'll be able to annotate more comprehensively, and then charge on a sliding scale to hide those annotations. Can actual censorship be far behind? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmSRWXCosxc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmSRWXCosxc
    - 394549 8y ago
      >> Having Google censor results could create the false impression that search results are censored similarly in the US as well. > ...false... > Maybe we can trust Google not to hide stuff from us, but how come the following bullshit is all over Youtube? You're going off into the weeds and talking about an entirely different issue. Google search results in the US are not censored similarly to China's: you can search for Tiananmen Square or Kent State and get accurate results. The kind of thing we're talking about is a scenario where those queries return nothing, or only garbage the supports the party line. The false impression is the one created when a Chinese person cross-checks Baidu against a hypothetical Google.cn and sees no difference in censorship, and makes the error that Google.cn reflects the behavior of Google.com. We're not talking about poor labeling around who funded what (which is not censorship at all, by the way).

by 394549 8y ago

ElBarto 8y ago

This is China. Search results are censored and people are fully aware of that. This is a storm in a tea cup, but it shows that the US feel increasingly insecure when it comes to China.

WalterSear 8y ago
Aware or not, they are still being manipulated. 25 years after Tiananmen, most Chinese university students have never heard of it https://www.vox.com/2014/6/3/5775918/25-years-after-tiananmen-most-chinese-univeristy-students-have-never https://www.vox.com/2014/6/3/5775918/25-years-after-tiananme...
- jessaustin 8y ago
  Lots of stuff gets swept under the rug. I received 13 years of USA primary and secondary education, and I've traveled in the Philippines. Despite that, I didn't learn until earlier this week that USA soldiers had killed hundreds of thousands of Filipinos at the turn of the century.
  - WalterSear 8y ago
    That wasn't something that was done by people still alive and in power.
    - jessaustin 8y ago
      It's true that very few USA officials have been in office for 120 years. I'm not sure why that matters? USA actions during and after the Philippine-American War aren't substantially different than our actions in several subsequent wars. Although lots of Americans disagreed with it at the time, there's only enough room in the library for so many Mark Twain books. As these things do, pretty soon it all took on a sort of awful momentum, and then talking about it was pointless. McKinley himself played it off as just a tragic circumstance: "If old Dewey had just sailed away when he smashed that Spanish fleet, what a lot of trouble he would have saved us." "Gosh, if only we had known there were no WMDs!" Nothing about the Philippine-American War made it into any history book ever assigned to any student in USA, just as nothing about the liars who killed 600,000 Iraqis ever will. Aware or not, we are still being manipulated.
      - WalterSear 8y ago
        These are fair points, but don't address the fact that nobody is trying to hide the Iraq war from the internet.
        jessaustin 8y ago
        I read lots of articles about Meuller, but none of them mention his testimony in support of the Iraq War.
394549 8y ago
> This is China. Search results are censored and people are fully aware of that. Having Google censor results could create the false impression that search results are censored similarly in the US as well.
- jessaustin 8y ago
  ...false... Maybe we can trust Google not to hide stuff from us, but how come the following bullshit is all over Youtube? "teleSUR is funded in whole or in part by the Latin American government" [0] First of all, that warning doesn't even make sense. "The Latin American government"? Who's the president in that government? Maybe they have a king? Is that government less reliable than the USA government? Do they fight as many wars? Does the USA government fund any part of any media sources? More importantly, now that this sort of pathetic annotation has started, wouldn't we expect it to increase? If Alphabet require a complete accounting of all income sources for all video posters, they'll be able to annotate more comprehensively, and then charge on a sliding scale to hide those annotations. Can actual censorship be far behind? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmSRWXCosxc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmSRWXCosxc
  - 394549 8y ago
    >> Having Google censor results could create the false impression that search results are censored similarly in the US as well. > ...false... > Maybe we can trust Google not to hide stuff from us, but how come the following bullshit is all over Youtube? You're going off into the weeds and talking about an entirely different issue. Google search results in the US are not censored similarly to China's: you can search for Tiananmen Square or Kent State and get accurate results. The kind of thing we're talking about is a scenario where those queries return nothing, or only garbage the supports the party line. The false impression is the one created when a Chinese person cross-checks Baidu against a hypothetical Google.cn and sees no difference in censorship, and makes the error that Google.cn reflects the behavior of Google.com. We're not talking about poor labeling around who funded what (which is not censorship at all, by the way).