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I don't have firsthand knowledge, but my conjecture is that the old Google probably had a significant % of employees who held the belief "We shouldn't censor fo

I don't have firsthand knowledge, but my conjecture is that the old Google probably had a significant % of employees who held the belief "We shouldn't censor for China, even if that makes us lose money". But over a period of years, whatever they selected for in hiring led to enough people joining, who don't give a damn about human rights in China, so the censorship went ahead. The only thing that stopped it was bad press. People with ethical sense leaving Google makes the balance worse. So the dealings with China will probably resume, at an even greater pace, when the public forgets about the first controversy. (edit: I should say first two controversies, since they stopped censoring in 2010, then tried to resurrect it as Dragonfly in 2018, then stopped again)

shadowgovt 7y ago
Google hired a significant number of Chinese citizens and migrants who didn't leave China for political reasons. Not surprisingly, they tend not to see China's government policy as evil.
- akfanta 7y ago
  > Chinese citizens and migrants who didn't leave China for political reasons. According to whom?
  - amadeusw 7y ago
    There's plenty. Here's one example [0] > Convoys of Chinese patriots in Ferraris and other high-end sports cars have been revving up pro-Beijing demonstrations in Canada, home to tens of thousands of Chinese millionaire migrants. [0] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3023499/worst-fast-and-furious-movie-ever-convoys-ferrari-driving-pro https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3023499/wors...
    - bduerst 7y ago
      That's an article about a car enthusiast club in Vancouver, not Google employees.
  - novok 7y ago
    They moved for primarily financial reasons. When your apolitical and not actively discriminated against, it would be hard to leave china for 'political' reasons when your primary reason is financial.
- Seenso 7y ago
  > Google hired a significant number of Chinese citizens and migrants who didn't leave China for political reasons. Not surprisingly, they tend not to see China's government policy as evil. It takes years in the right environment for someone like that to start to think differently. All kinds of important facts and ideas were kept from them, much of it random things that don't come up often that they may not even realize. For a less than unusual example: a lot of Chinese think the US never apologized for accidentally bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Balkans conflict, but it did so, publicly: https://www.c-span.org/video/?123188-1/youth-violence-embassy-bombing-apology https://www.c-span.org/video/?123188-1/youth-violence-embass.... The Chinese government portrayed the bombing as a deliberate act, and used it to create a sense of nationalist outrage in the population. The apology didn't fit the narrative so it wasn't reported. How long would it take for someone whose views were shaped by things like that outrage to get exposed to the truth randomly, given how infrequently this event comes up?
  - elldoubleyew 7y ago
    I don't understand this philosophy of "if only they could change their minds" The current regime has broken records year over year and almost the entire population is happy with them. Chinese people are better off every single day. Who are we as westerners to say that our system of governance is better than theirs? How can you be so sure that their system will inevitably be bad for the people? Just because an absolute right to say (almost) whatever you want is essential to the political philosophy of the west does not mean that it can/would mesh well in Chinese society. I know you guys are going to want to crucify me for saying a lot of this but I work with a lot of people in mainland China and no one has any problems with the government, they stick to their own business and are doing pretty damn well. Obviously this could change one day but thats not our job as non-chinese citizens to decide.
    - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
      > Who are we as westerners to say that our system of governance is better than theirs? Nobody is advocating overthrowing Xi Jinping. But if you're in America, benefiting from the freedoms afforded to Americans (and their fruits), it's fair to ask you don't undermine those values at home or abroad.
Aperocky 7y ago
> ethical sense Define that. For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better? Does it improve information flow over existing domestic search engines? I think the answer is obvious. People subscribe to overly simplistic thinking - if something is not perfect, it must be the worst. I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of government. Who gets hurt in this case? Ordinary people living their life.
- kortilla 7y ago
  Even if something offers convenience, that doesn’t make it ethical.
- akfanta 7y ago
  > People subscribe to overly simplistic thinking - if something is not perfect, it must be the worst. Sometimes I think this is a result of information explosion. People gets overwhelmed by the amount of available information, so as a self-protection mechanism, they subscribe to the simplest binary thought process.
- homonculus1 7y ago
  That's only one concern. Another concern is not normalizing such policies to propagate back over here. When you as a decisionmaker make excuses as to why it's okay to cooperate with information suppression in another country, then there are no principles stopping you from doing the same things back home--just precedent and personal incentives. For a cartoonish example let's say Adolf Hitler approaches you to buy large quantities of morphine as a substitute for Zyklon B. Surely this is an improvement for the victims of extermination over their current situation, but you're still participating in the Holocaust. I think utilitarianism has a big problem with myopia. It's extremely hard to do a real global calculation for outcomes so faithful practitioners inevitably end up following local gradients. I think a solid ethical equilibrium requires a certain amount of deontology, a framework of things that We Do Not Do.
- untog 7y ago
  > For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better? Does it improve information flow over existing domestic search engines? I think the answer is obvious. What does that have to do with ethics, really? Your argument seems to be that utility should outweigh ethical concerns. > I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of government. Who gets hurt in this case? Ordinary people living their life. So do you think governments were wrong to sanction South Africa's apartheid regime? Do you not think that the ordinary people in South Africa have a better life today as a result of those sanctions and the collapse of the apartheid regime?
kortilla 7y ago
I’m not sure the hiring really changed so much as a the supply of people. Google hires heavily from universities and the popularity of free speech amongst university students has been down over the last decade. The title 9 inquisitions and general climate has completely changed the tone to the point that many adults exiting college don’t really have any problem with suppression of “harmful speech”. The same applies to their employees abroad, most of which also view “freedom of speech” as a strange American obsession rather than a right worth trying to impose on the Chinese.
- kccqzy 7y ago
  Perhaps a better way to express this is to say there are far more Chinese students in American universities than just ten years ago. Statistics that show this are abundant. Since Google likes to hire people straight out of college, we now see a higher proportion of these Chinese students, who are apolitical or in fact support the Chinese government.
bigcohoneypot 7y ago
The younger they hire, the more they will hate the USA and love china.
JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> whatever they selected for in hiring Status seeking. Google has become the safe, secure job for people with low risk tolerance. That personality has predictable effects in any bureaucracy.
- virtuous_signal 7y ago
  To be more generous, they hire fantastically bright people, but they do not give candidates an ethics quiz, nor would it even be possible to construct a non-gameable filter. This likely goes for any company that grows from small to giant: early on, you hire people you know and trust, or that your (trustworthy) employees know and trust. But when you're deluged with applicants, you hire people who can solve leetcode hards in 30 minutes.
awb 7y ago
> "We shouldn't censor for China, even if that makes us lose money" Back in 2010 there were many other opportunities to grow the company. The bigger you get the harder it is to grow. Playing ball with China becomes one of the easier ways to keep growing once you reach a certain size. The NBA did the same thing after they saturated the US market. I'm sure many execs have performance incentives / stock options that caused the shift in policy.
- ganstyles 7y ago
  The interesting thing about the NBA growing into China was that not only were they playing ball with China but went a step further and we're playing ball _in_ China.
mrtksn 7y ago
And the change is probably for the better. I loved what the US ideals used to stand for but how ethical is to impose US ethics or laws on other countries even if it was possible? The Internet is no longer this network of bright individuals, it's part of society's fabric. In a few years, the US understanding of morality might change to Christian fundamentalism, gun culture, anti-vaxxing, respect to the authority, anti-euro and so on and the US might differentiate even from the UK in many aspects and fall in odds even with Western Europe. Would it be expected that the employee's rally for these causes too and try to overcome some German vaccination laws? If the new cool becomes Mormonism, should employees make sure that the message of the Mormons must be delivered in Turkey? Sure, my examples are extremely exaggregated but winds are blowing in different directions in every part of the world and I would prefer if the companies don't pick sides here. Not censoring Google doesn't change a thing in China because the problem is not that the locals in China are looking into these things but couldn't find info due to the censorship. For these tech giants, I think, is enough if they don't turn into a tool for control and surveillance. Serve the censored search results, show your ads and make your money, obey the local laws and Just don't be enablers for oppression. There's a difference between limiting your product to obey the law and gathering list of people for persecution.
- gowld 7y ago
  Human rights don't have national borders.
- tmpz22 7y ago
  Our country literally once deposed a democratic government over the business interests of a banana company. My only hope is that historians are unbiased enough in the future to clearly mark the United States of America as the bad guys. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars#American_fruit_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars#American_fruit_com...
criddell 7y ago
> led to enough people joining, who don't give a damn about human rights in China The UN lists privacy as a human right. The entire company is built on violating human rights at scale no matter where those people reside.
andrewmutz 7y ago
What I don't understand about the outrage surrounding Dragonfly is that Google didn't leave China because of the need to censor its search engine, it conducted business in that way in the late 2000s. It left China because of the cyber attacks in Operation Aurora. It seems the Googlers of today are holding Google to a higher ethical standard than the Googlers of 2009, since Google offered a censored search engine in china at that time and this did not produce the sort of outrage we see today.
president 7y ago
Agreed and it's what I've been saying all along. This is what you get when your hiring is based solely on puzzles and algorithms. In all of the engineering interviews I've undertaken in the Bay Area in the last 10 years (a LOT), none focused on any aspect other than raw technical skill. Very little if any on soft skills, communication, ethics, etc. What happens when these guys get promoted into higher leadership roles over the years, you get a slow poisoning of company values and culture because many of these people don't know about anything other than coding.
wonnage 7y ago
> who don't give a damn about human rights in China I don't think this is limited to China. Google has no qualms surveilling on behalf of the US government either. But it's not really a matter of ethical sense. Google is big enough that everyone has a bone to pick with something Google does. Conversely, people can find a way to justify anything. So when anything you do is ethically wrong (in 2020, as long as one person with a twitter following thinks so, it's Wrong), and anything you do is also ethically justifiable (in 2020, as long as one person with a twitter following thinks so, it's Right), ethics isn't really how you make decisions anymore. It's just a matter of how much money will we make, will we get sued, and who's gonna manage PR.
cbhl 7y ago
Google's annual diversity report shows that Asian+ representation in Tech has gone from 38.6% in 2014 to 51.8% in 2018. (Note: this includes both mainland Chinese and other Asians.) https://diversity.google/annual-report/ https://diversity.google/annual-report/ In my personal opinion, it has become more common for me to see groups of software engineers informally discuss an issue (say, at someone's desk, or walking down the hallway) entirely in Mandarin instead of English.
hintymad 7y ago
I find it very strange in the logic of these Google employees. A censored Google in China will still be miles better than the next alternative, Baidu. Wouldn't it be true that a better search engine will keep people better informed, for which people will have better chance of improving their lives, even their political systems? And now Google employees, with their all righteousness, are claiming that Chinese people don't deserve a much better product, because they need to suffer for these employees' political ideal? If this is not hypocrisy, I don't know what is.

shadowgovt 7y ago

Google hired a significant number of Chinese citizens and migrants who didn't leave China for political reasons. Not surprisingly, they tend not to see China's government policy as evil.

akfanta 7y ago
> Chinese citizens and migrants who didn't leave China for political reasons. According to whom?
- amadeusw 7y ago
  There's plenty. Here's one example [0] > Convoys of Chinese patriots in Ferraris and other high-end sports cars have been revving up pro-Beijing demonstrations in Canada, home to tens of thousands of Chinese millionaire migrants. [0] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3023499/worst-fast-and-furious-movie-ever-convoys-ferrari-driving-pro https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3023499/wors...
  - bduerst 7y ago
    That's an article about a car enthusiast club in Vancouver, not Google employees.
- novok 7y ago
  They moved for primarily financial reasons. When your apolitical and not actively discriminated against, it would be hard to leave china for 'political' reasons when your primary reason is financial.
Seenso 7y ago
> Google hired a significant number of Chinese citizens and migrants who didn't leave China for political reasons. Not surprisingly, they tend not to see China's government policy as evil. It takes years in the right environment for someone like that to start to think differently. All kinds of important facts and ideas were kept from them, much of it random things that don't come up often that they may not even realize. For a less than unusual example: a lot of Chinese think the US never apologized for accidentally bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Balkans conflict, but it did so, publicly: https://www.c-span.org/video/?123188-1/youth-violence-embassy-bombing-apology https://www.c-span.org/video/?123188-1/youth-violence-embass.... The Chinese government portrayed the bombing as a deliberate act, and used it to create a sense of nationalist outrage in the population. The apology didn't fit the narrative so it wasn't reported. How long would it take for someone whose views were shaped by things like that outrage to get exposed to the truth randomly, given how infrequently this event comes up?
- elldoubleyew 7y ago
  I don't understand this philosophy of "if only they could change their minds" The current regime has broken records year over year and almost the entire population is happy with them. Chinese people are better off every single day. Who are we as westerners to say that our system of governance is better than theirs? How can you be so sure that their system will inevitably be bad for the people? Just because an absolute right to say (almost) whatever you want is essential to the political philosophy of the west does not mean that it can/would mesh well in Chinese society. I know you guys are going to want to crucify me for saying a lot of this but I work with a lot of people in mainland China and no one has any problems with the government, they stick to their own business and are doing pretty damn well. Obviously this could change one day but thats not our job as non-chinese citizens to decide.
  - JumpCrisscross 7y ago
    > Who are we as westerners to say that our system of governance is better than theirs? Nobody is advocating overthrowing Xi Jinping. But if you're in America, benefiting from the freedoms afforded to Americans (and their fruits), it's fair to ask you don't undermine those values at home or abroad.

Aperocky 7y ago

> ethical sense Define that. For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better? Does it improve information flow over existing domestic search engines? I think the answer is obvious. People subscribe to overly simplistic thinking - if something is not perfect, it must be the worst. I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of government. Who gets hurt in this case? Ordinary people living their life.

kortilla 7y ago
Even if something offers convenience, that doesn’t make it ethical.
akfanta 7y ago
> People subscribe to overly simplistic thinking - if something is not perfect, it must be the worst. Sometimes I think this is a result of information explosion. People gets overwhelmed by the amount of available information, so as a self-protection mechanism, they subscribe to the simplest binary thought process.
homonculus1 7y ago
That's only one concern. Another concern is not normalizing such policies to propagate back over here. When you as a decisionmaker make excuses as to why it's okay to cooperate with information suppression in another country, then there are no principles stopping you from doing the same things back home--just precedent and personal incentives. For a cartoonish example let's say Adolf Hitler approaches you to buy large quantities of morphine as a substitute for Zyklon B. Surely this is an improvement for the victims of extermination over their current situation, but you're still participating in the Holocaust. I think utilitarianism has a big problem with myopia. It's extremely hard to do a real global calculation for outcomes so faithful practitioners inevitably end up following local gradients. I think a solid ethical equilibrium requires a certain amount of deontology, a framework of things that We Do Not Do.
untog 7y ago
> For regular people in China, does the addition of Google with some censorship make their life better? Does it improve information flow over existing domestic search engines? I think the answer is obvious. What does that have to do with ethics, really? Your argument seems to be that utility should outweigh ethical concerns. > I see a lot of people promoting sanctions on a country because of government. Who gets hurt in this case? Ordinary people living their life. So do you think governments were wrong to sanction South Africa's apartheid regime? Do you not think that the ordinary people in South Africa have a better life today as a result of those sanctions and the collapse of the apartheid regime?

kortilla 7y ago

I’m not sure the hiring really changed so much as a the supply of people. Google hires heavily from universities and the popularity of free speech amongst university students has been down over the last decade. The title 9 inquisitions and general climate has completely changed the tone to the point that many adults exiting college don’t really have any problem with suppression of “harmful speech”. The same applies to their employees abroad, most of which also view “freedom of speech” as a strange American obsession rather than a right worth trying to impose on the Chinese.

kccqzy 7y ago
Perhaps a better way to express this is to say there are far more Chinese students in American universities than just ten years ago. Statistics that show this are abundant. Since Google likes to hire people straight out of college, we now see a higher proportion of these Chinese students, who are apolitical or in fact support the Chinese government.

bigcohoneypot 7y ago

The younger they hire, the more they will hate the USA and love china.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago

> whatever they selected for in hiring Status seeking. Google has become the safe, secure job for people with low risk tolerance. That personality has predictable effects in any bureaucracy.

virtuous_signal 7y ago
To be more generous, they hire fantastically bright people, but they do not give candidates an ethics quiz, nor would it even be possible to construct a non-gameable filter. This likely goes for any company that grows from small to giant: early on, you hire people you know and trust, or that your (trustworthy) employees know and trust. But when you're deluged with applicants, you hire people who can solve leetcode hards in 30 minutes.

awb 7y ago

> "We shouldn't censor for China, even if that makes us lose money" Back in 2010 there were many other opportunities to grow the company. The bigger you get the harder it is to grow. Playing ball with China becomes one of the easier ways to keep growing once you reach a certain size. The NBA did the same thing after they saturated the US market. I'm sure many execs have performance incentives / stock options that caused the shift in policy.

ganstyles 7y ago
The interesting thing about the NBA growing into China was that not only were they playing ball with China but went a step further and we're playing ball _in_ China.

mrtksn 7y ago

And the change is probably for the better. I loved what the US ideals used to stand for but how ethical is to impose US ethics or laws on other countries even if it was possible? The Internet is no longer this network of bright individuals, it's part of society's fabric. In a few years, the US understanding of morality might change to Christian fundamentalism, gun culture, anti-vaxxing, respect to the authority, anti-euro and so on and the US might differentiate even from the UK in many aspects and fall in odds even with Western Europe. Would it be expected that the employee's rally for these causes too and try to overcome some German vaccination laws? If the new cool becomes Mormonism, should employees make sure that the message of the Mormons must be delivered in Turkey? Sure, my examples are extremely exaggregated but winds are blowing in different directions in every part of the world and I would prefer if the companies don't pick sides here. Not censoring Google doesn't change a thing in China because the problem is not that the locals in China are looking into these things but couldn't find info due to the censorship. For these tech giants, I think, is enough if they don't turn into a tool for control and surveillance. Serve the censored search results, show your ads and make your money, obey the local laws and Just don't be enablers for oppression. There's a difference between limiting your product to obey the law and gathering list of people for persecution.

gowld 7y ago
Human rights don't have national borders.
tmpz22 7y ago
Our country literally once deposed a democratic government over the business interests of a banana company. My only hope is that historians are unbiased enough in the future to clearly mark the United States of America as the bad guys. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars#American_fruit_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Wars#American_fruit_com...

criddell 7y ago

> led to enough people joining, who don't give a damn about human rights in China The UN lists privacy as a human right. The entire company is built on violating human rights at scale no matter where those people reside.

andrewmutz 7y ago

What I don't understand about the outrage surrounding Dragonfly is that Google didn't leave China because of the need to censor its search engine, it conducted business in that way in the late 2000s. It left China because of the cyber attacks in Operation Aurora. It seems the Googlers of today are holding Google to a higher ethical standard than the Googlers of 2009, since Google offered a censored search engine in china at that time and this did not produce the sort of outrage we see today.

president 7y ago

Agreed and it's what I've been saying all along. This is what you get when your hiring is based solely on puzzles and algorithms. In all of the engineering interviews I've undertaken in the Bay Area in the last 10 years (a LOT), none focused on any aspect other than raw technical skill. Very little if any on soft skills, communication, ethics, etc. What happens when these guys get promoted into higher leadership roles over the years, you get a slow poisoning of company values and culture because many of these people don't know about anything other than coding.

wonnage 7y ago

> who don't give a damn about human rights in China I don't think this is limited to China. Google has no qualms surveilling on behalf of the US government either. But it's not really a matter of ethical sense. Google is big enough that everyone has a bone to pick with something Google does. Conversely, people can find a way to justify anything. So when anything you do is ethically wrong (in 2020, as long as one person with a twitter following thinks so, it's Wrong), and anything you do is also ethically justifiable (in 2020, as long as one person with a twitter following thinks so, it's Right), ethics isn't really how you make decisions anymore. It's just a matter of how much money will we make, will we get sued, and who's gonna manage PR.

cbhl 7y ago

Google's annual diversity report shows that Asian+ representation in Tech has gone from 38.6% in 2014 to 51.8% in 2018. (Note: this includes both mainland Chinese and other Asians.) https://diversity.google/annual-report/ https://diversity.google/annual-report/ In my personal opinion, it has become more common for me to see groups of software engineers informally discuss an issue (say, at someone's desk, or walking down the hallway) entirely in Mandarin instead of English.

hintymad 7y ago

I find it very strange in the logic of these Google employees. A censored Google in China will still be miles better than the next alternative, Baidu. Wouldn't it be true that a better search engine will keep people better informed, for which people will have better chance of improving their lives, even their political systems? And now Google employees, with their all righteousness, are claiming that Chinese people don't deserve a much better product, because they need to suffer for these employees' political ideal? If this is not hypocrisy, I don't know what is.