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> Any claim that Google would have helped China censor Chinese citizens ignores the fact that Chinese search engines are already censored. So what? That does n

> Any claim that Google would have helped China censor Chinese citizens ignores the fact that Chinese search engines are already censored. So what? That does not make censorship morally acceptable. This would be the same as saying that using slave labor is ok, if you do it in a country that already accepts slavery anyway, and you are treating you slaves better. > And by surfacing better information for queries, it can also help people finding what they want for things that are not censored. Once the state is performing censorship there is no such thing as "better information". If all information is filtered by the government, then all information is suspicious. > but do consider how lives of hundreds of millions of people will be affected by your actions/inactions. I have profound sympathy for the victims of authoritarian regimes, and I absolutely do not believe that the way to help them is to collaborate with the very system that oppresses them. Pretending otherwise sounds like Newspeak to me. > I know some people prefer to stick their noses up and hold what they perceive as the moral high ground Maybe some people are like that, but this is unimportant. The important thing is this: you have to put your own oxygen mask on before helping others. If we in the west allow our companies to collaborate with systems that hold values that are repugnant to our own, then we will become like those systems, not the other way around. There will be nowhere to hide. No thank you. Let's not be naive: say what you want about the Chinese government, but they are not imbeciles. If they did not perceive Dragonfly as something that would help them maintain their repressive apparatus, they would not allow it.

khc 7y ago
Comparing this to slavery is silly. This is more like when the entire country is enslaved, and you move to the country. The analogy breaks down because the fact that you may or may not have slaves doesn't change the supply and demand of the slaves. When you said all information is filtered by the government, that shows your ignorance of how things work in China. The rest are not worth responding to.
- TelmoMenezes 7y ago
  > The analogy breaks down because the fact that you may or may not have slaves doesn't change the supply and demand of the slaves. Nothing that I said is related to the supply and demand of anything. > When you said all information is filtered by the government, that shows your ignorance of how things work in China. All information is potentially filtered / monitored by the government. I am well aware that people use VPNs to circumvent censorship, and that censorship itself is highly flawed. That does not change the fact that, once inside such a repressive apparatus, you cannot be certain of anything you read and you cannot feel safe in reading it. This is a country where people "disappear" for wrongthinking. > The rest are not worth responding to. This is the typical answer of those who have no counter-arguments.
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  > that shows your ignorance of how things work in China Then please educate us. I'd like to know the limits of china's censorship.
  - tempguy9999 7y ago
    Again, I request that you explain this. As a westerner my crude understanding may be skewed by biased presentation I read about.
baby 7y ago
Your problem is that you're seeing this issue as black and white, which never does good.
- tgragnato 7y ago
  Hundreds of millions of people are "negatively affected" by their government and a concerned human being appealed to compassion. Realists can acknowledge that countries and companies will negotiate according to their own self-interest. Google is right in sustaining that it's up to Chinese citizens to uphold said government to standards (whatever they will be): it's a technology company that wanted an access to the Chinese market, not a charity working for the good of foreign people. That's extremely practical, not something that's on a scale of black and white. When employees define Dragonfly internals as disturbing I'm prone to honestly think that it wouldn't have helped in finding censored material. Smells like something management would say to justify a money-driven decision. Looking for a gray scale in choices like these is a distraction. See no evil - Hear no evil - Speak no evil - Accept moral ambiguity
  - baby 7y ago
    Let's respectfully disagree then. I firmly believe that this would have improved the status quo for everyone, and that a vocal minority who also firmly believe they are right prevented that. They are kind of like Rorschach who refused to compromised in the last pages of Watchmen, even though it was the right thing to do (in my opinion).
- TelmoMenezes 7y ago
  I have no problem listening to the nuances. Please feel free to educate me, but give counter-arguments to what I wrote and spare me the clichés.
cirenehc 7y ago
> I have profound sympathy for the victims of authoritarian regimes, and I absolutely do not believe that the way to help them is to collaborate with the very system that oppresses them. Pretending otherwise sounds like Newspeak to me. I have relatives in China. Censorship is the least of their worries when the current Baidu monopoly is allowing promoted results that are sometimes flat-out evil (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Wei_Zexi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Wei_Zexi).
- sterlind 7y ago
  I'm heartened by the response, though. Shares fell 14%, the government announced an investigation, and Baidu set aside $150m USD equivalent for people harmed by promoted results. Especially considering that the ad buyer was a government military hospital, that seems.. more just than I'd expect. I guess it could be all for show, but I've seen worse behavior from Facebook here
benjaminbrodie 7y ago
Your entire speech pattern is positively comical. This is the thing with democracy: it produces individuals who like to "shine" in conversation, rewards rhetoric and theatrics at the expense of reason. It should be kept in mind that democracy originally didn't mean "rule by the people". It meant rule by demos, ie common people. "There is no democracy in physics. We can't say that some second-rate guy has as much right to opinion as Fermi." - Luis Walter Alvarez
- dang 7y ago
  It's not ok to cross into personal attack here, regardless of how annoying you find a comment. If we all did that, that's all we'd do. It's also not ok to take threads on generic ideological tangents, because those have all been repeated so often as to have become predictable, and lead to boring discussions if not flamewars. Would you mind reviewing the HN guidelines and taking the spirit of this site to heart when commenting here? We're trying for something a bit better than internet default. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
zhenjier 7y ago
As a Chinese, educated in US(otherwise you may say I'm brain washed heh). Your comment disgusts me. Western value is not global value, what you see wrong is not absolutely wrong elsewhere. Even if the West is the current domination power in the world it doesn't give it the right to push its value onto other civilizations. So let me ask you this, how arrogant and ignorant is it for you to tell us what is right and wrong given the huge difference of culture background???
- threezero 7y ago
  Wait, are you saying that organ harvesting and Muslim re-education camps are just different cultural values, and no one should judge China for it?

khc 7y ago

Comparing this to slavery is silly. This is more like when the entire country is enslaved, and you move to the country. The analogy breaks down because the fact that you may or may not have slaves doesn't change the supply and demand of the slaves. When you said all information is filtered by the government, that shows your ignorance of how things work in China. The rest are not worth responding to.

TelmoMenezes 7y ago
> The analogy breaks down because the fact that you may or may not have slaves doesn't change the supply and demand of the slaves. Nothing that I said is related to the supply and demand of anything. > When you said all information is filtered by the government, that shows your ignorance of how things work in China. All information is potentially filtered / monitored by the government. I am well aware that people use VPNs to circumvent censorship, and that censorship itself is highly flawed. That does not change the fact that, once inside such a repressive apparatus, you cannot be certain of anything you read and you cannot feel safe in reading it. This is a country where people "disappear" for wrongthinking. > The rest are not worth responding to. This is the typical answer of those who have no counter-arguments.
tempguy9999 7y ago
> that shows your ignorance of how things work in China Then please educate us. I'd like to know the limits of china's censorship.
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  Again, I request that you explain this. As a westerner my crude understanding may be skewed by biased presentation I read about.

baby 7y ago

Your problem is that you're seeing this issue as black and white, which never does good.

tgragnato 7y ago
Hundreds of millions of people are "negatively affected" by their government and a concerned human being appealed to compassion. Realists can acknowledge that countries and companies will negotiate according to their own self-interest. Google is right in sustaining that it's up to Chinese citizens to uphold said government to standards (whatever they will be): it's a technology company that wanted an access to the Chinese market, not a charity working for the good of foreign people. That's extremely practical, not something that's on a scale of black and white. When employees define Dragonfly internals as disturbing I'm prone to honestly think that it wouldn't have helped in finding censored material. Smells like something management would say to justify a money-driven decision. Looking for a gray scale in choices like these is a distraction. See no evil - Hear no evil - Speak no evil - Accept moral ambiguity
- baby 7y ago
  Let's respectfully disagree then. I firmly believe that this would have improved the status quo for everyone, and that a vocal minority who also firmly believe they are right prevented that. They are kind of like Rorschach who refused to compromised in the last pages of Watchmen, even though it was the right thing to do (in my opinion).
TelmoMenezes 7y ago
I have no problem listening to the nuances. Please feel free to educate me, but give counter-arguments to what I wrote and spare me the clichés.

cirenehc 7y ago

> I have profound sympathy for the victims of authoritarian regimes, and I absolutely do not believe that the way to help them is to collaborate with the very system that oppresses them. Pretending otherwise sounds like Newspeak to me. I have relatives in China. Censorship is the least of their worries when the current Baidu monopoly is allowing promoted results that are sometimes flat-out evil (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Wei_Zexi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Wei_Zexi).

sterlind 7y ago
I'm heartened by the response, though. Shares fell 14%, the government announced an investigation, and Baidu set aside $150m USD equivalent for people harmed by promoted results. Especially considering that the ad buyer was a government military hospital, that seems.. more just than I'd expect. I guess it could be all for show, but I've seen worse behavior from Facebook here

benjaminbrodie 7y ago

Your entire speech pattern is positively comical. This is the thing with democracy: it produces individuals who like to "shine" in conversation, rewards rhetoric and theatrics at the expense of reason. It should be kept in mind that democracy originally didn't mean "rule by the people". It meant rule by demos, ie common people. "There is no democracy in physics. We can't say that some second-rate guy has as much right to opinion as Fermi." - Luis Walter Alvarez

dang 7y ago
It's not ok to cross into personal attack here, regardless of how annoying you find a comment. If we all did that, that's all we'd do. It's also not ok to take threads on generic ideological tangents, because those have all been repeated so often as to have become predictable, and lead to boring discussions if not flamewars. Would you mind reviewing the HN guidelines and taking the spirit of this site to heart when commenting here? We're trying for something a bit better than internet default. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

zhenjier 7y ago

As a Chinese, educated in US(otherwise you may say I'm brain washed heh). Your comment disgusts me. Western value is not global value, what you see wrong is not absolutely wrong elsewhere. Even if the West is the current domination power in the world it doesn't give it the right to push its value onto other civilizations. So let me ask you this, how arrogant and ignorant is it for you to tell us what is right and wrong given the huge difference of culture background???

threezero 7y ago
Wait, are you saying that organ harvesting and Muslim re-education camps are just different cultural values, and no one should judge China for it?