11 ms·

Ex-Google engineer describing the company's role in China censorship

282 points by seapunk 8y ago

thecatspaw 8y ago
why do people write whole blogposts on twitter?
- Brotkrumen 8y ago
  You go where your customers are, or audience iin this case
  - pdkl95 8y ago
    Reaching a large audience can be useful, but it might not be worth the cost of using an established medium. From the forward - which was probably written by Marshall McLuhan - to Edmund Snow Carpenter's book "They became what they beheld": > If you address yourself to an audience, you accept at the outset the basic premises that unite the audience. You put on the audience, repeating cliches familiar to it. > Utilizing existing channels can wipe out a statement. There is a widely accepted misconception that media merely serve as neutral packages for the dissemination of raw facts. Photographers once thought that by getting their photographs published in Life, they wo9uld thereby reach large audiences. Gradually they discovered that the only message that came through was Life magazine itself and that their pictures had become but bits & pieces of that message. Unwittingly they contributed to a message far removed from the one they intended. Twitter may actually be a useful tool for reaching large audiences for some messages, but "the medium is the message" and using Twitter as your medium clearly involves diluting your message with the "Twitter style".
- mocae 8y ago
  Maybe because they don't have a blog and/or all their followers are on twitter?
- inopinatus 8y ago
  The format is kinda a cross between Twitter and Medium, so in my household it is (perhaps unfairly) named Tedium.
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    I bet Tedium is one of those names that has yet to be taken for a social media startup.
    - AlphaWeaver 8y ago
      Tedium is actually the name of a fairly popular mailing list [0] about weird backstories to phenomena in everyday life. [0]: https://tedium.co/ https://tedium.co/
lallysingh 8y ago
The CEO is not a founder. He's beholden to the shareholders without any leverage for pushback.
- simion314 8y ago
  I am not familiar how this things work, is there some kind of a vote where shareholders debate if this(censorship) is a good idea or not? Or there are only a few people that can decide it.
  - sleepychu 8y ago
    It's implicit, the CEO must deliver value to the shareholders or be replaced. Capitalism doesn't leave a lot of room for moral standing.
    - C1sc0cat 8y ago
      Rather difficult with Googles dual class share structure
    - robin_reala 8y ago
      That’s totally arguable though. For example: ‘By actively not engaging with the Chinese market we retain our core client base in the US, which would leak away in the event of persistant negative media coverage’. It doesn’t have to be a straight up monetary calculation.
    - sveme 8y ago
      Shareholders have and should have moral positions as well. Capitalism can and should be tamed, otherwise there is no difference between Mexican cartels and American corporations.
    - tikkabhuna 8y ago
      Large shareholders have corporate values (ethical, etc) that they will push onto companies they own shares in. Blackrock[1] has said social responsibility is important to them. Companies looking for investment need to operate with principles aligned with investors or investors will look for alternatives. [1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/23/blackrocks-push-for-social-responsibility-shows-shift-in-companies.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/23/blackrocks-push-for-social-r...
mocae 8y ago
> 6/ The other thing I find disturbing, after all these years, is the willingness of my former colleagues to not only comply with the censorship but their enthusiasm in rationalizing it. It is not a coincidence that the rationale they give was the same one management had given them This is the really disgusting thing. Are they "just" sucking up to management or are they maybe the only ones who buy the propaganda? Or is this some kind of self-justification process that protects them from their dying sense of guilt?
- pjc50 8y ago
  This effect is really strong, and people don't usually realise they're doing it. "Power creates opinion", as the man says. As does loyalty. It's much more psychologically comfortable in an organisation if you reflexively adopt its attitudes and values.
- rangibaby 8y ago
  It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. – Upton Sinclair
  - mocae 8y ago
    I get this dependency argument. I'm actually very familiar with it. There is still a level below where you become part of the story.
- gjm11 8y ago
  The fact that management and employees give the same rationale for doing a thing isn't evidence of bad faith, because this is also what would happen if there were a good reason, or at least one that looks good to some reasonable people, that both management and employees were convinced by. I'm not familiar with this case, but if e.g. the reason is "Whatever we do, the Chinese government is going to ensure that any search results its population can see are censored. So our choice is whether they get censored Google search results or censored someone-else search results, and it's hard to see how the first of those can be worse either for us or for them" ... then I don't know whether it's actually a good reason, but it does seem like a reason that some decent and intelligent people might find convincing, even if they have a normally functioning sense of guilt. For the avoidance of doubt, the opposite position -- "if you do this you're an accomplice to oppression, and 'if we don't do it someone else will' is a lousy response" -- also seems to me one that some decent and intelligent people might find convincing. No one on either side of this needs to be an idiot or a scoundrel. (Though I bet some people on both sides are both, because that's always true.)
comesee 8y ago
Google is clearly evil now. Will anyone do anything about it?
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  Like what? Will anyone do anything about China? How about the US? "Will anyone do anything about it" is classic bystander effect by the way - what are you doing about it?
  - Doctor_Fegg 8y ago
    To be fair, HN is probably the biggest single forum of people building alternatives to Google products (aside from internal MS/Apple etc. forums, one presumes).
lewisflude 8y ago
Aside: I found the final sentence of the article (injected by Threader) interesting. "Enjoy Threader? Tell @jack." I wonder if Twitter will eventually branch out into more long form content like this.
stef25 8y ago
Is authoritarianism in China getting better or worse? If it's getting better than what it used to be under actual communist rule then perhaps there's still some hope for economic prosperity bringing democracy to China.
- humanrebar 8y ago
  It could be less authoritarian despite the economic prosperity. Or it could just be complicated.
- sverige 8y ago
  It's still actual communist rule -- by the Communist Party of China, no less.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    It's rule by people who use the brand "communist", but they aren't actually communists in any meaningful sense, not even as in what the word meant to the Soviets. China is very authoritarian, but it is not communist or even socialist. Fascism would be an accurate description, though, as Mussolini himself defined it ("Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.")
    - eeZah7Ux 8y ago
      Chinese economy is a good example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism To follow up on your quote: "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." - Giovanni Gentile
    - auganov 8y ago
      It's very hard to estimate how large the public sector is. Low-ball estimates would put it at around 30% which is a tad more than most in the socialism-leaning Europe. That is when you only count enterprises that are officially state owned. If you loosen it up 50% or even 60% isn't unreasonable (check out work of Derek Scissors). The communism vs fascism question is always though. Soviet Russia can easily be described as both communist and strongly fascistic.
thelastidiot 8y ago
Google was doing no evil till Sundar Pichai happened.
ElBarto 8y ago
This is the real world. Google and the US are better off being present in China that being left out.
- trendia 8y ago
  Why?
  - ElBarto 8y ago
    From the perspective of Google it is obviously important to be present in the largest market on Earth both commercially and strategically, and not to let its competitors have it all for themselves. From the perspective of the US (Google is an American company) it is obviously tactically and strategically important to have the best information possible on what is going on in China. This is much, much easier to achieve when American companies are present "on the ground". For example, I am sure that this project gives the US a pretty good insight on what the Chinese government does. It would be much more difficult to ask Tencent how the Chinese system works, wouldn't it?
    - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
      Google doesn’t really have world-wide competitors in the Chinese search market. Baidu is basically a large scale healthcare scam, while Bing is struggling Foreign companies face different rules in China when compared to Chinese ones via selective enforcement of law. They will not be exposed to the same real Chinese system.
      - ElBarto 8y ago
        Google's market share in China is basically 0... But apart from that no competitors, LOL.
        seanmcdirmid 8y ago
        From a world wide perspective, google yielding the search market to China has yet to effect them since their competitors operating there are not at all competitive. Edited my origins comment for clarity.
mirap 8y ago
Do we have any valuable resources like this, but from 2018?
lvoudour 8y ago
9/ For many people there is little difference between what is legal and what is moral. This mindset is especially dangerous when it is held by people in power, such as Google's executives. The mindset is: if it's a legal requirement to censor, then we should do it. Except when standing on a moral pedestal does not hurt your bottom line. Then apparently it's ok to dictate what is moral and what is not, what is good and what is evil and use your power to force your agenda. It's not google's (or any company's) version of morality that gets me, it's always the hypocrisy
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  The free market does have a tendency of weeding out those companies that act morally beyond legality, because less moral competitors can outcompete them. So as a survival bias, less moral companies are just more likely to be left standing. Likewise, morality beyond legality is much more likely if it doesn’t yield any ground to competitors (ie effect the bottom line), so what you see as hypocrisy might again just be survival bias in a free market.
  - humanrebar 8y ago
    Don't know why you single out free markets there. A lack of scruples can be advantageous in economically closed environments as well.
    - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
      Survival bias applies to a lot of situations. For example, in a system where corruption is endemic, non-corrupt officials won’t get promoted (because they have no dirt higher ups can use against them and/or don’t bribe the right people), leaving only corrupt officials. Do non-corrupt officials exist? Yes, but they are not likely to survive to he noticed.
  - ced 8y ago
    That's true in competitive markets, but in tech, winner-takes-all happens more often than not, and it affords the winner a lot of freedom.
baybal2 8y ago
On the other note: Google's new 'research centre' in Beijing looks to be much more than it should be, much more like a smallish campus.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
What happens to Google in 10 years if they don't move into the China market? Can Google survive without moving into China? Will some upstart move in there and dominate the market? Will the stock market punish Google for not moving into China? Why is it OK to have all our devices, etc. manufactured in China, but it's not OK for Google to offer services there?
- int_19h 8y ago
  Why wouldn't Google survive without China? > Why is it OK to have all our devices, etc. manufactured in China, but it's not OK for Google to offer services there? Because manufacturing our devices there does not directly enable their oppressive practices, such as political censorship. But offering services there does, since China demands that all such services come with censorship tools built-in, and (per this guy's Twitter), actually wants the companies to take down content on demand. TL;DR: it's the difference between doing business with a known criminal, and assisting them in commission of their crimes.
  - ISL 8y ago
    One can readily argue that doing business with a criminal deprives law-abiding (or moral) actors of revenue with which to gain an economy of scale.
    - int_19h 8y ago
      Sure. I'm not saying that it's good to do that. But I don't think anyone would argue that it's far worse to actively and directly enable the criminal.
  - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
    > Because manufacturing our devices there does not directly enable their oppressive practices, such as political censorship. So, it's OK to give them trillions of dollars in business because we benefit even though they're going to use those trillions to further their agenda? Directly or indirectly, the results are the same.
flamedoge 8y ago
Honest question: Should a company like google take the lesser evil route and still provide neutered service simply because target audience is huge? Google could still bring a lot of good to the people. Sure it doesn't exactly subscribe to the Western ideals, but is distancing from China throwing baby out with the bathwater?
- curt15 8y ago
  >Google could still bring a lot of good to the people. Such as...?
  - yourbandsucks 8y ago
    Such as the 99.9% of human knowledge that isn't politically objectionable to the CCP?
    - titzer 8y ago
      ...and implicitly consecrating the non-existence of the 0.1%? This is pretty much the problem.
      - yourbandsucks 8y ago
        Depends on who you're worrying about. If you're worrying about Chinese people, you're improving their access. If you're worrying about your own moral purity, I suppose you'll have to balance that against above mentioned access. If you want, you can find some people who live in China and ask them how much Google's "consecration" moves the needle for them.
        titzer 8y ago
        Well, if anything, this just makes discrete a soft type of censorship which is algorithmically unavoidable and already widespread in non "censored" countries. We're already in a post-truth world, so why not a post-truth internet?
baybal2 8y ago
... on the other note: Madurai - a city where Sundar was born, is known to be a communist enclave in otherwise nationalist dominated state of Tamil Nadu. Check out his father's background and 'the labour activism'...
qubax 8y ago
So china wanted google news and google search censored. Honestly, what's the big deal? Google news and google search is also censored in the US, Europe, Middle East and everywhere. Why is it that so many vocal ex-employees are against censorship in china, but demand censorship in the US? I'm against censorship everywhere but the self-righteousness of these people when it comes to china is getting to be unbearable. These ex-employees are saying google has to censor news and search because the internet is "too toxic" and causing too much division. This is precisely what the chinese authorities say to justify censorship. And with the recent revelations of how politically driven and manipulative google is ( and has been ), I highly doubt the chinese or any country would allow google in without certain restrictions.
- humanrebar 8y ago
  China is doing something different entirely here. Denying facts to keep the population under control, for instance. That is different entirely from what the typical Western country censors: advertising illegal drugs, child porn, hate speech, etc. https://www.businessinsider.com/words-china-banned-from-search-engines-after-tiananmen-square-2014-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/words-china-banned-from-sear...
  - qubax 8y ago
    > Denying facts to keep the population under control, for instance. This is different from us how? > That is different entirely from what the typical Western country censors: advertising illegal drugs, child porn, hate speech, etc. China also censors illegal drugs, child porn, "hate speech", etc. You are right. China censors for the good of their own citizens and our censors do so for the good of us. Oh wait, that sounds exactly the same. I love people who conflate "hate speech" with child porn and illegal drugs. Is physics "hate speech" to flat earthers? Should we censor physics? What's next? Hate thought? Should we monitor people's brain for hate thought. Science itself is hate speech to religious people. Should we censor science? There are lots of facts that people on both sides consider "hate speech". For example, I consider your support of censorship hate speech. Should you be censored? Just as I said, these people love censorship in the US but hate censorship in china. Makes me wonder who and what is pushing and funding such anti-liberal and anti-western "hate speech" in the US. In all my time on the internet, I haven't come across such openly fascistic and anti-liberal "hate speech" until fairly recently.
Yetanfou 8y ago
It is an odd thing that a company can on the one hand become known as the one firing an engineer who tried to open an honest discussion on a hot subject like 'gender discrimination' because that engineer was deemed to lack a moral compass, while on the other hand bending over backwards to assist an oppressive - but lucrative - dictatorship in implementing a real-life version of Oceania's Ingsoc [1] [2]. As if these people are so blind-sided by their own ideology that they do not recognise their own moral compasses twirling as if they're in the Bermuda triangle and the 'no' being struck from their previous motto of 'do no evil'. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingsoc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingsoc [2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-18/china-social-credit-a-model-citizen-in-a-digital-dictatorship/10200278 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-18/china-social-credit-a...
- topmonk 8y ago
  It's not about a moral compass, it's about attracting top talent. The universities push this ideology, so if you want to get the alumni from the universities to work for you, you have to abide by the tenets.
  - claydavisss 8y ago
    You mean, you have to pretend you abide by the tenets...
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    The limit of profit based entities. Capitalism today but probably as old as humans.
  - nradov 8y ago
    Except that the notion of "top talent" appears to be a myth. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myth https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myt...
    - vertline3 8y ago
      Interesting link, I just skimmed it but I don't think it quite showed top talent is a myth, but rather that our ways of measuring that talent is flawed, this syncs up with ideas from Moneyball as well. We know that pitching is a talent, but we struggle to project who will be the future star due to our preconcieved biases. So in the story they found a stronger correlation between tacit knowledge than simply IQ for instance.
mikejb 8y ago
> 13/ I encourage employees of Google who have been asked to work on censored products to stand up against these requests, as I did in 2006, and make it known that Google's willingness to censor is immoral. I'd rather formulate it this way: I encourage employees of Google who have been asked to work on censored products to take a look from different perspectives, apply their values and morale, make an informed decision on whether they want to support what they're asked to work on - and have the spine to follow through with their decision. The reason why I disagree with the original statement is that it feels like people are forcing their own moral decisions on others. "I'm convinced it's bad, so you have to agree and act like it".
- pimmen 8y ago
  I would try to simplify it like this: "would you be able to look the people China will suppress with your technology in the eye and tell them 'I built the tools China use'?" edit: reformulated it to something less loaded
  - mikejb 8y ago
    That's pretty loaded. Try to reformulate it with less of your own bias.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - davidcbc 8y ago
    Honestly, hearing the opinions of many Chinese people with family still in China who want Google to go to China due to the current state of affairs with Baidu is what made me consider that there may be reasonable arguments on both sides of this (For full disclosure I have heard the opinions of Chinese people with family in China who disagree with Google going to China as well). I haven't come to a firm conclusion either way, but like most things it is more complicated than it original seems.
majia 8y ago
There are many Google mirror sites, most of which are blocked in China. If the Chinese government decides to work with some of the mirror sites to deliver Google search results in China, on the condition that the mirror sites must censor the search results, what would happen? I could think of three reactions from Google: 1. Block those mirror sites from accessing Google search results, but this may be technically difficult. 2. Do nothing. Effectively a censored Google becomes available in China but people can hardly blame google for not blocking the mirror sites. 3. Work with the mirror sites (e.g. require them to display Google ads). This is pretty much dragonfly. It seems that Dragonfly doesn't really change anything about China's censorship after all?
- aembleton 8y ago
  4. Feed the mirror sites mis-leading information that causes them to be less effective than Baidu and/or works past their filter and informs Chinese users.
  - majia 8y ago
    How? Google may accidentally feed misleading information to some real users, and this may cause a huge backfire like what happened to FB.
tinkerteller 8y ago
I get the hoopla but what’s the alternative? It’s not that Chinese customers are clamoring for any of the Google services. Without Google, China will continue to develop their home grown services with far more surveillance than Google would put in. There are zero nations in the world which will stand up against China and dare to ask them do things differently. Some scholars even believe that Chinese culture is predisposed to this kind of government and westerners are simply not “getting it”. I personally don’t get either Britain’s tendencies to put person in charge of declaring wars and face on their currency because of no other reason than that person being born in certain family.
mwj 8y ago
Not sure about the conditions of employment with Google, but if he has archives of emails long after he's left the company, could a lawsuit be forthcoming?
titzer 8y ago
The only morality of the global economy is growth.
agumonkey 8y ago
Time to flood this https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=google%20tell%20me%20how%20to%20stop%20using%20google https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=google%20tell%20me%20h...
lovemenot 8y ago
If Dragonfly should be launched yet fail to fly, whether for political or for business reasons, Google may perhaps fall back on Sergey Brin. Just as Twitter has cycled through its founders as CEO, after their serious mis-steps and failed initiatives.
dandare 8y ago
I don't get Google. The cost of switching to competitor's products are near-zero, Google's public image is its most valuable asset. Is the Chinese search market - and other evil products - really worth the risk? I have switched to DDGG 3 weeks ago and I am seriously testing Firefox.
- JeremyBanks 8y ago
  The cost of switching from Google was low when Search was their only product. They have their hooks a lot deeeper in users these days. Android, Gmail, Docs, and others are harder to switch away from.
  - yborg 8y ago
    It's more pervasive than that, they have hooks in the entire contemporary Internet ecosystem (DoubleClick, Google Analytics, etc.) So they don't care if you never touch a Google-branded site, they can collect and sell data on you. And Mozilla is largely funded by Google.
- est 8y ago
  The real problem with Google's china target is that China's internet is full of garbage. Public webpages values are near-zero because of the censorship. Nobody is willing to post publicly. The search results will be Garbage In Garbage Out. People are turning into invite-only "circles" like Wechat or Zhihu, where the real discussions happen and content generates. These sites are mostly non-indexable mobile apps and with billions of users. It's an dead end for Google and any other search engine business. Even China's domestic search engine Baidu is dead long ago and pivoted to AI strategy
jancsika 8y ago
> As I previously tweeted, Sergey Brin is a notable exception to this temptation, and he is reported to be the reason that Google left China in 2010 Dear digital spin doctors of HN, What are the likely online tactics that will be used to neutralize Brin's on-the-record statements and previous action regarding China? It must be a drag to practice those dark arts of digital public manipulation in secret all the time. So c'mon, make some public predictions with a throwaway and let us follow along at home! Edit: wording
cromwellian 8y ago
The real risk of Google entering China, and possibly succeeding, is the a reverse-effect happening with regard to censorship globally. The theory is, by Google operating in China, it will help liberalize and open things up, that may have worked in the Deng Xiaoping era when, but after the hardliners took power, and especially with Xi, things are going in the opposite direction of the "End of History" folks predictions. Economic well being did not bring an appetite for Democracy, it brought an appetite for not "rocking the boat"/"don't mess with a good thing" By reverse-effect, I mean, let's say Google is hugely successful in China. It proves a censored search engine works and is good business, first of all. So economic arguments about the harm will be delegitimatized. Other states will ask for more censorship, and Google can't reply 'this is too costly or harmful to our business' because China would be an example of how to make it work. So the end result might be that Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, and Indonesia, Brazil, Zimbabwe, etc will all of a sudden be asking for their own forks of Dragonfly. (I just picked those countries at random, with no specific example of censorship in mind) Secondly, if they become hugely successful in China, it compromises them just like Apple. The revenue stream will become a golden goose and too valuable to risk the anger of the government. So you'll have Google executives having to embarrass themselves like Tim Cook by praising China's "open" internet (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/12/04/apple-ceo-backs-chinas-vision-of-an-open-internet-as-censorship-reaches-new-heights/?utm_term=.5cabb9e90812 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/12/04...) Third, Google made one of the few brave moral decisions leaving China. Perhaps you don't believe Brin did it for the reasons claimed, but your belief isn't important, what is important is what many people believe this, especially politically repressed people who need to believe in heroic actions. This undercuts that decision. If the world's most popular company for organizing information not only fails to fight censorship, but actively helps regimes that wants to implement state level censorship, it will be a big loss of a beacon in the constant struggle between censorship and anti-censorship forces. Having the world's largest companies, even if they're only doing it for economic reasons, on the side of anti-censorship is better than having the world's largest companies on the side of censorship (for economic reasons) And fourth, Google can't change China. The idea that a SV tech company can trigger improvements in the politics and openness of a powerful country like China is quite simply hubris. We're not smart enough to do this, and intelligence isn't even the factor. China's future will be written by its people and internal events. If they want an uncensored search engine, then one day, the political winds will change, and they will demand it. But until they do so powerfully enough for the current government to change its behavior, the actions of foreign firms won't do anything. I'm not sure we should involve ourselves in this fight other than through NGOs that already fight these things (e.g. Amnesty International) or offering anti-firewall/anti-censorship tools. There's only one argument for doing business in China as a search engine, and it is a legitimate one, just not a moral one: the shareholder argument.
iamleppert 8y ago
Google is a creatively and morally bankrupt company. The original spark is long gone and it’s just another soul-less big company now.
est 8y ago
> because in the digital era, the suppression of information acessibilty is incompatible with free-market productivity LOL. This video is not available in your country. China is just a giant corp intranet with a huge ass firewall.
Harvard2018 8y ago
As a private company, shouldn't Google be allow to to do whatever it wants? Not only that, they [China] has a very different culture from us and Google needs to be respectful of their culture... of censorship.
mikejb 8y ago
The person posting this left Google in 2007 [1]. The screenshot indicates the emails took place in February 2016 and October 2018 [2]. The conversation seems focused around events before 2008 (e.g. the selection of holding the Olympic games in Beijing). (Other people pointed it out as well [3]). Were the dates in the emails faked? What's going on? [1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/vijayboyapati https://www.linkedin.com/in/vijayboyapati [2] https://twitter.com/real_vijay/status/1051725529512964096 https://twitter.com/real_vijay/status/1051725529512964096 [3] https://twitter.com/wiretapped/status/1051739819121016832 https://twitter.com/wiretapped/status/1051739819121016832

282 points by seapunk 8y ago

thecatspaw 8y ago

why do people write whole blogposts on twitter?

Brotkrumen 8y ago
You go where your customers are, or audience iin this case
- pdkl95 8y ago
  Reaching a large audience can be useful, but it might not be worth the cost of using an established medium. From the forward - which was probably written by Marshall McLuhan - to Edmund Snow Carpenter's book "They became what they beheld": > If you address yourself to an audience, you accept at the outset the basic premises that unite the audience. You put on the audience, repeating cliches familiar to it. > Utilizing existing channels can wipe out a statement. There is a widely accepted misconception that media merely serve as neutral packages for the dissemination of raw facts. Photographers once thought that by getting their photographs published in Life, they wo9uld thereby reach large audiences. Gradually they discovered that the only message that came through was Life magazine itself and that their pictures had become but bits & pieces of that message. Unwittingly they contributed to a message far removed from the one they intended. Twitter may actually be a useful tool for reaching large audiences for some messages, but "the medium is the message" and using Twitter as your medium clearly involves diluting your message with the "Twitter style".
mocae 8y ago
Maybe because they don't have a blog and/or all their followers are on twitter?
inopinatus 8y ago
The format is kinda a cross between Twitter and Medium, so in my household it is (perhaps unfairly) named Tedium.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  I bet Tedium is one of those names that has yet to be taken for a social media startup.
  - AlphaWeaver 8y ago
    Tedium is actually the name of a fairly popular mailing list [0] about weird backstories to phenomena in everyday life. [0]: https://tedium.co/ https://tedium.co/

lallysingh 8y ago

The CEO is not a founder. He's beholden to the shareholders without any leverage for pushback.

simion314 8y ago
I am not familiar how this things work, is there some kind of a vote where shareholders debate if this(censorship) is a good idea or not? Or there are only a few people that can decide it.
- sleepychu 8y ago
  It's implicit, the CEO must deliver value to the shareholders or be replaced. Capitalism doesn't leave a lot of room for moral standing.
  - C1sc0cat 8y ago
    Rather difficult with Googles dual class share structure
  - robin_reala 8y ago
    That’s totally arguable though. For example: ‘By actively not engaging with the Chinese market we retain our core client base in the US, which would leak away in the event of persistant negative media coverage’. It doesn’t have to be a straight up monetary calculation.
  - sveme 8y ago
    Shareholders have and should have moral positions as well. Capitalism can and should be tamed, otherwise there is no difference between Mexican cartels and American corporations.
  - tikkabhuna 8y ago
    Large shareholders have corporate values (ethical, etc) that they will push onto companies they own shares in. Blackrock[1] has said social responsibility is important to them. Companies looking for investment need to operate with principles aligned with investors or investors will look for alternatives. [1] - https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/23/blackrocks-push-for-social-responsibility-shows-shift-in-companies.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/23/blackrocks-push-for-social-r...

mocae 8y ago

> 6/ The other thing I find disturbing, after all these years, is the willingness of my former colleagues to not only comply with the censorship but their enthusiasm in rationalizing it. It is not a coincidence that the rationale they give was the same one management had given them This is the really disgusting thing. Are they "just" sucking up to management or are they maybe the only ones who buy the propaganda? Or is this some kind of self-justification process that protects them from their dying sense of guilt?

pjc50 8y ago
This effect is really strong, and people don't usually realise they're doing it. "Power creates opinion", as the man says. As does loyalty. It's much more psychologically comfortable in an organisation if you reflexively adopt its attitudes and values.
rangibaby 8y ago
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. – Upton Sinclair
- mocae 8y ago
  I get this dependency argument. I'm actually very familiar with it. There is still a level below where you become part of the story.
gjm11 8y ago
The fact that management and employees give the same rationale for doing a thing isn't evidence of bad faith, because this is also what would happen if there were a good reason, or at least one that looks good to some reasonable people, that both management and employees were convinced by. I'm not familiar with this case, but if e.g. the reason is "Whatever we do, the Chinese government is going to ensure that any search results its population can see are censored. So our choice is whether they get censored Google search results or censored someone-else search results, and it's hard to see how the first of those can be worse either for us or for them" ... then I don't know whether it's actually a good reason, but it does seem like a reason that some decent and intelligent people might find convincing, even if they have a normally functioning sense of guilt. For the avoidance of doubt, the opposite position -- "if you do this you're an accomplice to oppression, and 'if we don't do it someone else will' is a lousy response" -- also seems to me one that some decent and intelligent people might find convincing. No one on either side of this needs to be an idiot or a scoundrel. (Though I bet some people on both sides are both, because that's always true.)

comesee 8y ago

Google is clearly evil now. Will anyone do anything about it?

Cthulhu_ 8y ago
Like what? Will anyone do anything about China? How about the US? "Will anyone do anything about it" is classic bystander effect by the way - what are you doing about it?
- Doctor_Fegg 8y ago
  To be fair, HN is probably the biggest single forum of people building alternatives to Google products (aside from internal MS/Apple etc. forums, one presumes).

lewisflude 8y ago

Aside: I found the final sentence of the article (injected by Threader) interesting. "Enjoy Threader? Tell @jack." I wonder if Twitter will eventually branch out into more long form content like this.

stef25 8y ago

Is authoritarianism in China getting better or worse? If it's getting better than what it used to be under actual communist rule then perhaps there's still some hope for economic prosperity bringing democracy to China.

humanrebar 8y ago
It could be less authoritarian despite the economic prosperity. Or it could just be complicated.
sverige 8y ago
It's still actual communist rule -- by the Communist Party of China, no less.
- int_19h 8y ago
  It's rule by people who use the brand "communist", but they aren't actually communists in any meaningful sense, not even as in what the word meant to the Soviets. China is very authoritarian, but it is not communist or even socialist. Fascism would be an accurate description, though, as Mussolini himself defined it ("Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.")
  - eeZah7Ux 8y ago
    Chinese economy is a good example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism To follow up on your quote: "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." - Giovanni Gentile
  - auganov 8y ago
    It's very hard to estimate how large the public sector is. Low-ball estimates would put it at around 30% which is a tad more than most in the socialism-leaning Europe. That is when you only count enterprises that are officially state owned. If you loosen it up 50% or even 60% isn't unreasonable (check out work of Derek Scissors). The communism vs fascism question is always though. Soviet Russia can easily be described as both communist and strongly fascistic.

thelastidiot 8y ago

Google was doing no evil till Sundar Pichai happened.

ElBarto 8y ago

This is the real world. Google and the US are better off being present in China that being left out.

trendia 8y ago
Why?
- ElBarto 8y ago
  From the perspective of Google it is obviously important to be present in the largest market on Earth both commercially and strategically, and not to let its competitors have it all for themselves. From the perspective of the US (Google is an American company) it is obviously tactically and strategically important to have the best information possible on what is going on in China. This is much, much easier to achieve when American companies are present "on the ground". For example, I am sure that this project gives the US a pretty good insight on what the Chinese government does. It would be much more difficult to ask Tencent how the Chinese system works, wouldn't it?
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    Google doesn’t really have world-wide competitors in the Chinese search market. Baidu is basically a large scale healthcare scam, while Bing is struggling Foreign companies face different rules in China when compared to Chinese ones via selective enforcement of law. They will not be exposed to the same real Chinese system.
    - ElBarto 8y ago
      Google's market share in China is basically 0... But apart from that no competitors, LOL.
      - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
        From a world wide perspective, google yielding the search market to China has yet to effect them since their competitors operating there are not at all competitive. Edited my origins comment for clarity.

mirap 8y ago

Do we have any valuable resources like this, but from 2018?

lvoudour 8y ago

9/ For many people there is little difference between what is legal and what is moral. This mindset is especially dangerous when it is held by people in power, such as Google's executives. The mindset is: if it's a legal requirement to censor, then we should do it. Except when standing on a moral pedestal does not hurt your bottom line. Then apparently it's ok to dictate what is moral and what is not, what is good and what is evil and use your power to force your agenda. It's not google's (or any company's) version of morality that gets me, it's always the hypocrisy

seanmcdirmid 8y ago
The free market does have a tendency of weeding out those companies that act morally beyond legality, because less moral competitors can outcompete them. So as a survival bias, less moral companies are just more likely to be left standing. Likewise, morality beyond legality is much more likely if it doesn’t yield any ground to competitors (ie effect the bottom line), so what you see as hypocrisy might again just be survival bias in a free market.
- humanrebar 8y ago
  Don't know why you single out free markets there. A lack of scruples can be advantageous in economically closed environments as well.
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    Survival bias applies to a lot of situations. For example, in a system where corruption is endemic, non-corrupt officials won’t get promoted (because they have no dirt higher ups can use against them and/or don’t bribe the right people), leaving only corrupt officials. Do non-corrupt officials exist? Yes, but they are not likely to survive to he noticed.
- ced 8y ago
  That's true in competitive markets, but in tech, winner-takes-all happens more often than not, and it affords the winner a lot of freedom.

baybal2 8y ago

On the other note: Google's new 'research centre' in Beijing looks to be much more than it should be, much more like a smallish campus.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago

What happens to Google in 10 years if they don't move into the China market? Can Google survive without moving into China? Will some upstart move in there and dominate the market? Will the stock market punish Google for not moving into China? Why is it OK to have all our devices, etc. manufactured in China, but it's not OK for Google to offer services there?

int_19h 8y ago
Why wouldn't Google survive without China? > Why is it OK to have all our devices, etc. manufactured in China, but it's not OK for Google to offer services there? Because manufacturing our devices there does not directly enable their oppressive practices, such as political censorship. But offering services there does, since China demands that all such services come with censorship tools built-in, and (per this guy's Twitter), actually wants the companies to take down content on demand. TL;DR: it's the difference between doing business with a known criminal, and assisting them in commission of their crimes.
- ISL 8y ago
  One can readily argue that doing business with a criminal deprives law-abiding (or moral) actors of revenue with which to gain an economy of scale.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    Sure. I'm not saying that it's good to do that. But I don't think anyone would argue that it's far worse to actively and directly enable the criminal.
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  > Because manufacturing our devices there does not directly enable their oppressive practices, such as political censorship. So, it's OK to give them trillions of dollars in business because we benefit even though they're going to use those trillions to further their agenda? Directly or indirectly, the results are the same.

flamedoge 8y ago

Honest question: Should a company like google take the lesser evil route and still provide neutered service simply because target audience is huge? Google could still bring a lot of good to the people. Sure it doesn't exactly subscribe to the Western ideals, but is distancing from China throwing baby out with the bathwater?

curt15 8y ago
>Google could still bring a lot of good to the people. Such as...?
- yourbandsucks 8y ago
  Such as the 99.9% of human knowledge that isn't politically objectionable to the CCP?
  - titzer 8y ago
    ...and implicitly consecrating the non-existence of the 0.1%? This is pretty much the problem.
    - yourbandsucks 8y ago
      Depends on who you're worrying about. If you're worrying about Chinese people, you're improving their access. If you're worrying about your own moral purity, I suppose you'll have to balance that against above mentioned access. If you want, you can find some people who live in China and ask them how much Google's "consecration" moves the needle for them.
      - titzer 8y ago
        Well, if anything, this just makes discrete a soft type of censorship which is algorithmically unavoidable and already widespread in non "censored" countries. We're already in a post-truth world, so why not a post-truth internet?

baybal2 8y ago

... on the other note: Madurai - a city where Sundar was born, is known to be a communist enclave in otherwise nationalist dominated state of Tamil Nadu. Check out his father's background and 'the labour activism'...

qubax 8y ago

So china wanted google news and google search censored. Honestly, what's the big deal? Google news and google search is also censored in the US, Europe, Middle East and everywhere. Why is it that so many vocal ex-employees are against censorship in china, but demand censorship in the US? I'm against censorship everywhere but the self-righteousness of these people when it comes to china is getting to be unbearable. These ex-employees are saying google has to censor news and search because the internet is "too toxic" and causing too much division. This is precisely what the chinese authorities say to justify censorship. And with the recent revelations of how politically driven and manipulative google is ( and has been ), I highly doubt the chinese or any country would allow google in without certain restrictions.

humanrebar 8y ago
China is doing something different entirely here. Denying facts to keep the population under control, for instance. That is different entirely from what the typical Western country censors: advertising illegal drugs, child porn, hate speech, etc. https://www.businessinsider.com/words-china-banned-from-search-engines-after-tiananmen-square-2014-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/words-china-banned-from-sear...
- qubax 8y ago
  > Denying facts to keep the population under control, for instance. This is different from us how? > That is different entirely from what the typical Western country censors: advertising illegal drugs, child porn, hate speech, etc. China also censors illegal drugs, child porn, "hate speech", etc. You are right. China censors for the good of their own citizens and our censors do so for the good of us. Oh wait, that sounds exactly the same. I love people who conflate "hate speech" with child porn and illegal drugs. Is physics "hate speech" to flat earthers? Should we censor physics? What's next? Hate thought? Should we monitor people's brain for hate thought. Science itself is hate speech to religious people. Should we censor science? There are lots of facts that people on both sides consider "hate speech". For example, I consider your support of censorship hate speech. Should you be censored? Just as I said, these people love censorship in the US but hate censorship in china. Makes me wonder who and what is pushing and funding such anti-liberal and anti-western "hate speech" in the US. In all my time on the internet, I haven't come across such openly fascistic and anti-liberal "hate speech" until fairly recently.

Yetanfou 8y ago

It is an odd thing that a company can on the one hand become known as the one firing an engineer who tried to open an honest discussion on a hot subject like 'gender discrimination' because that engineer was deemed to lack a moral compass, while on the other hand bending over backwards to assist an oppressive - but lucrative - dictatorship in implementing a real-life version of Oceania's Ingsoc [1] [2]. As if these people are so blind-sided by their own ideology that they do not recognise their own moral compasses twirling as if they're in the Bermuda triangle and the 'no' being struck from their previous motto of 'do no evil'. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingsoc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingsoc [2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-18/china-social-credit-a-model-citizen-in-a-digital-dictatorship/10200278 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-18/china-social-credit-a...

topmonk 8y ago
It's not about a moral compass, it's about attracting top talent. The universities push this ideology, so if you want to get the alumni from the universities to work for you, you have to abide by the tenets.
- claydavisss 8y ago
  You mean, you have to pretend you abide by the tenets...
- agumonkey 8y ago
  The limit of profit based entities. Capitalism today but probably as old as humans.
- nradov 8y ago
  Except that the notion of "top talent" appears to be a myth. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myth https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myt...
  - vertline3 8y ago
    Interesting link, I just skimmed it but I don't think it quite showed top talent is a myth, but rather that our ways of measuring that talent is flawed, this syncs up with ideas from Moneyball as well. We know that pitching is a talent, but we struggle to project who will be the future star due to our preconcieved biases. So in the story they found a stronger correlation between tacit knowledge than simply IQ for instance.

mikejb 8y ago

> 13/ I encourage employees of Google who have been asked to work on censored products to stand up against these requests, as I did in 2006, and make it known that Google's willingness to censor is immoral. I'd rather formulate it this way: I encourage employees of Google who have been asked to work on censored products to take a look from different perspectives, apply their values and morale, make an informed decision on whether they want to support what they're asked to work on - and have the spine to follow through with their decision. The reason why I disagree with the original statement is that it feels like people are forcing their own moral decisions on others. "I'm convinced it's bad, so you have to agree and act like it".

pimmen 8y ago
I would try to simplify it like this: "would you be able to look the people China will suppress with your technology in the eye and tell them 'I built the tools China use'?" edit: reformulated it to something less loaded
- mikejb 8y ago
  That's pretty loaded. Try to reformulate it with less of your own bias.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- davidcbc 8y ago
  Honestly, hearing the opinions of many Chinese people with family still in China who want Google to go to China due to the current state of affairs with Baidu is what made me consider that there may be reasonable arguments on both sides of this (For full disclosure I have heard the opinions of Chinese people with family in China who disagree with Google going to China as well). I haven't come to a firm conclusion either way, but like most things it is more complicated than it original seems.

majia 8y ago

There are many Google mirror sites, most of which are blocked in China. If the Chinese government decides to work with some of the mirror sites to deliver Google search results in China, on the condition that the mirror sites must censor the search results, what would happen? I could think of three reactions from Google: 1. Block those mirror sites from accessing Google search results, but this may be technically difficult. 2. Do nothing. Effectively a censored Google becomes available in China but people can hardly blame google for not blocking the mirror sites. 3. Work with the mirror sites (e.g. require them to display Google ads). This is pretty much dragonfly. It seems that Dragonfly doesn't really change anything about China's censorship after all?

aembleton 8y ago
4. Feed the mirror sites mis-leading information that causes them to be less effective than Baidu and/or works past their filter and informs Chinese users.
- majia 8y ago
  How? Google may accidentally feed misleading information to some real users, and this may cause a huge backfire like what happened to FB.

tinkerteller 8y ago

I get the hoopla but what’s the alternative? It’s not that Chinese customers are clamoring for any of the Google services. Without Google, China will continue to develop their home grown services with far more surveillance than Google would put in. There are zero nations in the world which will stand up against China and dare to ask them do things differently. Some scholars even believe that Chinese culture is predisposed to this kind of government and westerners are simply not “getting it”. I personally don’t get either Britain’s tendencies to put person in charge of declaring wars and face on their currency because of no other reason than that person being born in certain family.

mwj 8y ago

Not sure about the conditions of employment with Google, but if he has archives of emails long after he's left the company, could a lawsuit be forthcoming?

titzer 8y ago

The only morality of the global economy is growth.

agumonkey 8y ago

Time to flood this https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=google%20tell%20me%20how%20to%20stop%20using%20google https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=google%20tell%20me%20h...

lovemenot 8y ago

If Dragonfly should be launched yet fail to fly, whether for political or for business reasons, Google may perhaps fall back on Sergey Brin. Just as Twitter has cycled through its founders as CEO, after their serious mis-steps and failed initiatives.

dandare 8y ago

I don't get Google. The cost of switching to competitor's products are near-zero, Google's public image is its most valuable asset. Is the Chinese search market - and other evil products - really worth the risk? I have switched to DDGG 3 weeks ago and I am seriously testing Firefox.

JeremyBanks 8y ago
The cost of switching from Google was low when Search was their only product. They have their hooks a lot deeeper in users these days. Android, Gmail, Docs, and others are harder to switch away from.
- yborg 8y ago
  It's more pervasive than that, they have hooks in the entire contemporary Internet ecosystem (DoubleClick, Google Analytics, etc.) So they don't care if you never touch a Google-branded site, they can collect and sell data on you. And Mozilla is largely funded by Google.
est 8y ago
The real problem with Google's china target is that China's internet is full of garbage. Public webpages values are near-zero because of the censorship. Nobody is willing to post publicly. The search results will be Garbage In Garbage Out. People are turning into invite-only "circles" like Wechat or Zhihu, where the real discussions happen and content generates. These sites are mostly non-indexable mobile apps and with billions of users. It's an dead end for Google and any other search engine business. Even China's domestic search engine Baidu is dead long ago and pivoted to AI strategy

jancsika 8y ago

> As I previously tweeted, Sergey Brin is a notable exception to this temptation, and he is reported to be the reason that Google left China in 2010 Dear digital spin doctors of HN, What are the likely online tactics that will be used to neutralize Brin's on-the-record statements and previous action regarding China? It must be a drag to practice those dark arts of digital public manipulation in secret all the time. So c'mon, make some public predictions with a throwaway and let us follow along at home! Edit: wording

cromwellian 8y ago

The real risk of Google entering China, and possibly succeeding, is the a reverse-effect happening with regard to censorship globally. The theory is, by Google operating in China, it will help liberalize and open things up, that may have worked in the Deng Xiaoping era when, but after the hardliners took power, and especially with Xi, things are going in the opposite direction of the "End of History" folks predictions. Economic well being did not bring an appetite for Democracy, it brought an appetite for not "rocking the boat"/"don't mess with a good thing" By reverse-effect, I mean, let's say Google is hugely successful in China. It proves a censored search engine works and is good business, first of all. So economic arguments about the harm will be delegitimatized. Other states will ask for more censorship, and Google can't reply 'this is too costly or harmful to our business' because China would be an example of how to make it work. So the end result might be that Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, and Indonesia, Brazil, Zimbabwe, etc will all of a sudden be asking for their own forks of Dragonfly. (I just picked those countries at random, with no specific example of censorship in mind) Secondly, if they become hugely successful in China, it compromises them just like Apple. The revenue stream will become a golden goose and too valuable to risk the anger of the government. So you'll have Google executives having to embarrass themselves like Tim Cook by praising China's "open" internet (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/12/04/apple-ceo-backs-chinas-vision-of-an-open-internet-as-censorship-reaches-new-heights/?utm_term=.5cabb9e90812 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/12/04...) Third, Google made one of the few brave moral decisions leaving China. Perhaps you don't believe Brin did it for the reasons claimed, but your belief isn't important, what is important is what many people believe this, especially politically repressed people who need to believe in heroic actions. This undercuts that decision. If the world's most popular company for organizing information not only fails to fight censorship, but actively helps regimes that wants to implement state level censorship, it will be a big loss of a beacon in the constant struggle between censorship and anti-censorship forces. Having the world's largest companies, even if they're only doing it for economic reasons, on the side of anti-censorship is better than having the world's largest companies on the side of censorship (for economic reasons) And fourth, Google can't change China. The idea that a SV tech company can trigger improvements in the politics and openness of a powerful country like China is quite simply hubris. We're not smart enough to do this, and intelligence isn't even the factor. China's future will be written by its people and internal events. If they want an uncensored search engine, then one day, the political winds will change, and they will demand it. But until they do so powerfully enough for the current government to change its behavior, the actions of foreign firms won't do anything. I'm not sure we should involve ourselves in this fight other than through NGOs that already fight these things (e.g. Amnesty International) or offering anti-firewall/anti-censorship tools. There's only one argument for doing business in China as a search engine, and it is a legitimate one, just not a moral one: the shareholder argument.

iamleppert 8y ago

Google is a creatively and morally bankrupt company. The original spark is long gone and it’s just another soul-less big company now.

est 8y ago

> because in the digital era, the suppression of information acessibilty is incompatible with free-market productivity LOL. This video is not available in your country. China is just a giant corp intranet with a huge ass firewall.

Harvard2018 8y ago

As a private company, shouldn't Google be allow to to do whatever it wants? Not only that, they [China] has a very different culture from us and Google needs to be respectful of their culture... of censorship.

mikejb 8y ago

The person posting this left Google in 2007 [1]. The screenshot indicates the emails took place in February 2016 and October 2018 [2]. The conversation seems focused around events before 2008 (e.g. the selection of holding the Olympic games in Beijing). (Other people pointed it out as well [3]). Were the dates in the emails faked? What's going on? [1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/vijayboyapati https://www.linkedin.com/in/vijayboyapati [2] https://twitter.com/real_vijay/status/1051725529512964096 https://twitter.com/real_vijay/status/1051725529512964096 [3] https://twitter.com/wiretapped/status/1051739819121016832 https://twitter.com/wiretapped/status/1051739819121016832