Google Censors Guns, Removes Shopping Results

medium.com

6 points·cpr··4 comments

The premise of this article is incorrect. Google has banned gun sales via the Shopping tool since 2012 [1]. Archive.org doesn't have a capture from 2012, but there's one from March 2016 [2]. This is not a new policy.

A few people noticed that you could buy bump stocks and asked about this on Twitter; Danny Sullivan responded [3]. This has had some unintended consequences on wine sales... [4].

[1] http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2012/06/28/google-shoppin... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160307053138/https://support.g... [3] https://twitter.com/dannysullivan/status/967521887914897408 [4] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/02/27/wine-lovers-cann...

So, let's just ask the obvious questions here:

1. Do you still trust Google to give equal access to information? If so, why?

2. Knowing that Google has in this case done weird censorship things, do you think that it's possible that they have done the same thing in the past with political, science, or policy issues that go against their zeitgeist?

3. If you think it is possible, to what extend should you trust your own political views that were formed while consuming sources and events curated by Google?

Extra credit: extend this line of questioning to Twitter, Bing, Yahoo, DDG, etc.

Well considering how easy it is to demonstrate this censorship. I would not trust anyone intentionally acting as a gate keeper. If the algorithm is missing something due to a blind spot that's fine. Also that tends to be small not an entire broad category or single word terms.

The same applies to any search engine. Weather or not you agree with google on this particular instance. They may do it with something you disagree them about in the future.

Needless to say I have not been using google for a while now.

Stop using google? Switched to duckduckgo.com along time ago!

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