6 ms·

> 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 enthu

by 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.)
- humanrebar 8y ago
  The counterargument is that censoring political speech is decidedly indecent regardless of anyone's intentions. If political censorship ceases to be unconscionable, then a culture is convinced that there is no right to speech or conscience. That is clearly true for China. It seems to be true for Google as well.
  - yourbandsucks 8y ago
    If we presume that the world isn't black and white, and we give some credence to the principle of "least harm".. There's a case to be made for providing more net information while being less than 100 percent morally pure in the process. The choice we're confronted with isn't "uncensored vs censored". It's "more information and access vs less information and access". It's a practical call. Chinese people are very practical, they'll figure it out.
    - michaelmrose 8y ago
      I guess you could call turning politic prisoners into organ donars practical https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/23/asia/china-organ-harvesting/ https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/23/asia/china-organ-harvesting/ As is deliberately killing pedestrians after accidentally injuring them in order to pay a lessor death benefit instead of expensive care. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/09/why_drivers_in_china_intentionally_kill_the_pedestrians_they_hit_china_s.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2... Im not worried about their practicality but rather that they are culturally morally bankrupt and revealing how morally bankrupt people like Google are.
      - bun_at_work 8y ago
        The existing systems in China place various pressures on the people there. You can't make the claim that Chinese people are morally bankrupt based on those cases alone. The government is, for sure. However, it's the legal system's fault for letting the punishment of injury outweigh the punishment of manslaughter. Furthermore, it's not as if Google has gone out of its way get into a position of censoring search results in China. Those search results are going to be censored no matter what. What Google does, whether they operate in China or not, doesn't effect that. All that changes is how much search-engine-generated money goes to Google or doesn't.
aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
Sounds like peak employee engagement to me! I’ve heard this is what companies should strive for.
lake99 8y ago
> Are they "just" sucking up to management or are they maybe the only ones who buy the propaganda? IMO, neither. I don't like this purported dichotomy between "management" and "colleagues/employees". I have seen several of my former classmates and colleagues transition into management roles. Their ideology hasn't changed much in the last 20 years. For example, in the Indian context, their view of Kashmir and the army's role there is pretty much the same as the government propaganda. "Management" did not convince them when we were all still in college, and did not convince them when we were all low-level employees. The people just happened to grow up in an environment where a certain ideological bent was considered "right", "virtuous", etc.
- mocae 8y ago
  Well this is kind of different thing since it's politics that is not necessary related to your business (I assume). Here you had people leaving because of the clash between business ideology and their (as well the outsides) moral values. The company did not only advance and hire people who already had no moral values. They just found out. Now they shift people around until the compatible ones stay.
  - lake99 8y ago
    I wouldn't go as far as to say the company hired people who had no moral values. Just different from that of people who advocate anti-censorship values. Progressive political values are the current mainstream. Liberalism has long been on the decline in the mainstream. Both managers and employees, by and large, subscribe to progressivism. As a clear example of this culture, just look at what kinds of voices have been silenced on social media, and what kinds have been given free reign. I'm not even talking about the content of the employees' speech here.
MaxBarraclough 8y ago
'Self-serving biases' are well-studied psychological phenomena. [0] We can expect that a Google employee working with China will be more favourable to the work, even accounting for factors like selection bias. My money is on self-justification being at least a part of the explanation, but that doesn't preclude some amount of sucking-up to management as well. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias
Fricken 8y ago
I really don't understand what people are upset about. Whether or not Google rolls out a censored search engine in China has no influence at all whatsoever in any way shape or form over whether or not the communist party will continue to enforce censorship. If Google backs out for political reasons, it's not like the party is going to suddenly see the error of their ways and do an about face on censorship. It's just business. Americans has been doing business with China, and the Chinese people for decades. In spite of the fact that the west and China are beholden to very different identities, we can still cooperate on things to the benefit of everyone. People are 99% the same everywhere, but the 1% that makes us different are matters of identity, and that's what we gripe about and go to war over. It's kind of stupid if you ask me, but then again, no one in the history of the world has ever come up with a reliable solution for human nature.
- emptybits 8y ago
  > we can still cooperate on things to the benefit of everyone Yes. What is the benefit of hobbling a world-class search engine so that it intentionally prevents "everyone" (I include Chinese citizens in your "everyone") from accessing free information and news and facts about the world and about China itself? All countries are guilty of mistakes and atrocities. So what is the benefit of preventing citizens from discovering this, learning from it, and discussing it?
- ardy42 8y ago
  > I really don't understand what people are upset about. Whether or not Google rolls out a censored search engine in China has no influence at all whatsoever in any way shape or form over whether or not the communist party will continue to enforce censorship. I'll list out some of the issues: 1. The view the censorship is immoral. The argument that "we should help them because we can profit and they'll do it with or without us" has some very serious flaws that can be easily shown by a few thought experiments. For instance: your colleague is going to rob a bank and there's nothing you can do to stop him, is it right for you to volunteer to drive the getaway car since he'll pay you handsomely if you do? If you don't drive, someone else will, and you'll be leaving money on the table. > It's just business. Americans has been doing business with China, and the Chinese people for decades. In spite of the fact that the west and China are beholden to very different identities, we can still cooperate on things to the benefit of everyone. 2. Doing business with China gives the Communist Party leverage to influence corporate operations elsewhere for ideological reasons. They've shown increasing willingness to use that influence to push their political views (for a recent example, see the recent situation with how foreign airlines represent Taiwan on their foreign-language websites). Imagine, ten years from now, Google because popular and profitable in mainland China. The Communist Party wants to manage Western perceptions of an issue (say Tibet) and gives Google an ultimatum: derank all pro-Tibet independence websites from the top 20 results of certain Tibet-related searches, or they'll shutdown their Chinese operations. What choice do you think the shareholder-value maximizing corporation is going to make? This article tackles the topic from a different angle: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/11/if-the-u-s-doesnt-control-corporate-power-china-will/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/11/if-the-u-s-doesnt-contr...
matz1 8y ago
This isn't suprising, every person have different moral compass and value. I too would gladly work on this. Censorship is just a necessary work around (for now) to enter the chinese market.
- programmarchy 8y ago
  This is lazy thinking. Or do you think the unabomber was justified because he simply had a different moral compass?
  - mikejb 8y ago
    Not who you replied to, but your comparison is a bit off. Everyone has to choose their own morals and values, and what they think is right or wrong. But no one can choose whether something is legal or not. If someone thinks that destroying property or killing a person for reason XYZ is ok, than they have the right to believe that - and surprisingly many people do. But that doesn't mean they are allowed to, or should be doing it. We have laws because we can't rely on people's morals.
    - matz1 8y ago
      >no one can choose whether something is legal or not Yes some can, it's matter of influence or how powerful you are
      - mikejb 8y ago
        Fair point. (Luckily the Unabomber did not have that power or influence)
  - matz1 8y ago
    To him it was justified and no matter how evil a person you think it is, I'm pretty sure you can always find some other people who think its is right.
sieabahlpark 8y ago
Judging by how many internal political issues they have I don't doubt there are some shitty people making Google evil.
est 8y ago
Technically, removing results by DMCA or hate speech or "fake news" is about the same procedure as political censorship. The mechanism is already there. The difference is only which part of the model to tweaks and for whom.
bliblah 8y ago
Is it really that odd? There are a lot of posters in HN that are FAANG employees, yet talk big game about Open Source, Data Security, Free Speech, etc yet time and time again these companies fail to uphold these values. When you are making a 6+ figure salary with vesting options it's really easy to bend your principles and if you are lucky you can become wealthy enough to become a philanthropist somewhere down the line to undo some of the damage you have done.

by mocae 8y ago

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.)

humanrebar 8y ago
The counterargument is that censoring political speech is decidedly indecent regardless of anyone's intentions. If political censorship ceases to be unconscionable, then a culture is convinced that there is no right to speech or conscience. That is clearly true for China. It seems to be true for Google as well.
- yourbandsucks 8y ago
  If we presume that the world isn't black and white, and we give some credence to the principle of "least harm".. There's a case to be made for providing more net information while being less than 100 percent morally pure in the process. The choice we're confronted with isn't "uncensored vs censored". It's "more information and access vs less information and access". It's a practical call. Chinese people are very practical, they'll figure it out.
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    I guess you could call turning politic prisoners into organ donars practical https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/23/asia/china-organ-harvesting/ https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/23/asia/china-organ-harvesting/ As is deliberately killing pedestrians after accidentally injuring them in order to pay a lessor death benefit instead of expensive care. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2015/09/why_drivers_in_china_intentionally_kill_the_pedestrians_they_hit_china_s.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2... Im not worried about their practicality but rather that they are culturally morally bankrupt and revealing how morally bankrupt people like Google are.
    - bun_at_work 8y ago
      The existing systems in China place various pressures on the people there. You can't make the claim that Chinese people are morally bankrupt based on those cases alone. The government is, for sure. However, it's the legal system's fault for letting the punishment of injury outweigh the punishment of manslaughter. Furthermore, it's not as if Google has gone out of its way get into a position of censoring search results in China. Those search results are going to be censored no matter what. What Google does, whether they operate in China or not, doesn't effect that. All that changes is how much search-engine-generated money goes to Google or doesn't.

aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago

Sounds like peak employee engagement to me! I’ve heard this is what companies should strive for.

lake99 8y ago

> Are they "just" sucking up to management or are they maybe the only ones who buy the propaganda? IMO, neither. I don't like this purported dichotomy between "management" and "colleagues/employees". I have seen several of my former classmates and colleagues transition into management roles. Their ideology hasn't changed much in the last 20 years. For example, in the Indian context, their view of Kashmir and the army's role there is pretty much the same as the government propaganda. "Management" did not convince them when we were all still in college, and did not convince them when we were all low-level employees. The people just happened to grow up in an environment where a certain ideological bent was considered "right", "virtuous", etc.

mocae 8y ago
Well this is kind of different thing since it's politics that is not necessary related to your business (I assume). Here you had people leaving because of the clash between business ideology and their (as well the outsides) moral values. The company did not only advance and hire people who already had no moral values. They just found out. Now they shift people around until the compatible ones stay.
- lake99 8y ago
  I wouldn't go as far as to say the company hired people who had no moral values. Just different from that of people who advocate anti-censorship values. Progressive political values are the current mainstream. Liberalism has long been on the decline in the mainstream. Both managers and employees, by and large, subscribe to progressivism. As a clear example of this culture, just look at what kinds of voices have been silenced on social media, and what kinds have been given free reign. I'm not even talking about the content of the employees' speech here.

MaxBarraclough 8y ago

'Self-serving biases' are well-studied psychological phenomena. [0] We can expect that a Google employee working with China will be more favourable to the work, even accounting for factors like selection bias. My money is on self-justification being at least a part of the explanation, but that doesn't preclude some amount of sucking-up to management as well. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias

Fricken 8y ago

I really don't understand what people are upset about. Whether or not Google rolls out a censored search engine in China has no influence at all whatsoever in any way shape or form over whether or not the communist party will continue to enforce censorship. If Google backs out for political reasons, it's not like the party is going to suddenly see the error of their ways and do an about face on censorship. It's just business. Americans has been doing business with China, and the Chinese people for decades. In spite of the fact that the west and China are beholden to very different identities, we can still cooperate on things to the benefit of everyone. People are 99% the same everywhere, but the 1% that makes us different are matters of identity, and that's what we gripe about and go to war over. It's kind of stupid if you ask me, but then again, no one in the history of the world has ever come up with a reliable solution for human nature.

emptybits 8y ago
> we can still cooperate on things to the benefit of everyone Yes. What is the benefit of hobbling a world-class search engine so that it intentionally prevents "everyone" (I include Chinese citizens in your "everyone") from accessing free information and news and facts about the world and about China itself? All countries are guilty of mistakes and atrocities. So what is the benefit of preventing citizens from discovering this, learning from it, and discussing it?
ardy42 8y ago
> I really don't understand what people are upset about. Whether or not Google rolls out a censored search engine in China has no influence at all whatsoever in any way shape or form over whether or not the communist party will continue to enforce censorship. I'll list out some of the issues: 1. The view the censorship is immoral. The argument that "we should help them because we can profit and they'll do it with or without us" has some very serious flaws that can be easily shown by a few thought experiments. For instance: your colleague is going to rob a bank and there's nothing you can do to stop him, is it right for you to volunteer to drive the getaway car since he'll pay you handsomely if you do? If you don't drive, someone else will, and you'll be leaving money on the table. > It's just business. Americans has been doing business with China, and the Chinese people for decades. In spite of the fact that the west and China are beholden to very different identities, we can still cooperate on things to the benefit of everyone. 2. Doing business with China gives the Communist Party leverage to influence corporate operations elsewhere for ideological reasons. They've shown increasing willingness to use that influence to push their political views (for a recent example, see the recent situation with how foreign airlines represent Taiwan on their foreign-language websites). Imagine, ten years from now, Google because popular and profitable in mainland China. The Communist Party wants to manage Western perceptions of an issue (say Tibet) and gives Google an ultimatum: derank all pro-Tibet independence websites from the top 20 results of certain Tibet-related searches, or they'll shutdown their Chinese operations. What choice do you think the shareholder-value maximizing corporation is going to make? This article tackles the topic from a different angle: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/11/if-the-u-s-doesnt-control-corporate-power-china-will/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/11/if-the-u-s-doesnt-contr...

matz1 8y ago

This isn't suprising, every person have different moral compass and value. I too would gladly work on this. Censorship is just a necessary work around (for now) to enter the chinese market.

programmarchy 8y ago
This is lazy thinking. Or do you think the unabomber was justified because he simply had a different moral compass?
- mikejb 8y ago
  Not who you replied to, but your comparison is a bit off. Everyone has to choose their own morals and values, and what they think is right or wrong. But no one can choose whether something is legal or not. If someone thinks that destroying property or killing a person for reason XYZ is ok, than they have the right to believe that - and surprisingly many people do. But that doesn't mean they are allowed to, or should be doing it. We have laws because we can't rely on people's morals.
  - matz1 8y ago
    >no one can choose whether something is legal or not Yes some can, it's matter of influence or how powerful you are
    - mikejb 8y ago
      Fair point. (Luckily the Unabomber did not have that power or influence)
- matz1 8y ago
  To him it was justified and no matter how evil a person you think it is, I'm pretty sure you can always find some other people who think its is right.

sieabahlpark 8y ago

Judging by how many internal political issues they have I don't doubt there are some shitty people making Google evil.

est 8y ago

Technically, removing results by DMCA or hate speech or "fake news" is about the same procedure as political censorship. The mechanism is already there. The difference is only which part of the model to tweaks and for whom.

bliblah 8y ago

Is it really that odd? There are a lot of posters in HN that are FAANG employees, yet talk big game about Open Source, Data Security, Free Speech, etc yet time and time again these companies fail to uphold these values. When you are making a 6+ figure salary with vesting options it's really easy to bend your principles and if you are lucky you can become wealthy enough to become a philanthropist somewhere down the line to undo some of the damage you have done.