1. Recently reported white-out on "gun purchase" related searches. Gun laws (and enforcement) certainly need to be improved, but Google is not the elected body to decide what is good and bad for the society.
2. Banning (or preventing from making money) conservative channels/pundits on YouTube. It does not matter if some of them are lunatics, they are no better or worse than someone pushing "herbal remedies" or some such.
Nobody had an inherent right to be heard on somebody else’s platform.
Same goes for Facebook.
But that's not the problem. The problem is that Google has this monopoly in the first place. Big monopolies and oligarchies are anathema to both democracy and to a free market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama could possibly set a precedent against your argument, right? If someone could sufficiently prove that Google's platform is big enough to cause meaningful harm to those who are censored off of it, Google could be treated differently than an average website.
2. What happens when the channels in question violate the ToS (Sandy Hook conspiracies often fall into this category)? Should no action be taken because they have a political slant?
You can certainly make an argument that internet platforms should be less like Facebook and YouTube and more like 4chan's /b board, but you need to at least acknowledge that there are tradeoffs with having a ToS that tolerates everything legal.
https://www.jta.org/2013/06/20/news-opinion/the-telegraph/na...
In an interview I saw with the lawyer, I remember him struggling with the morality of it, but his explanation was pretty amazing. He said something along the lines of: If you allow the encroachment of liberty in the name of silencing Nazis, one day soon, the Nazis will be using that same power against you.
The lawyer's own family didn't understand his dedication to free speech. I personally found his reasoning to make sense. If you allow Google to sensor gun search results, one day, after a change in who's in power there, they may be censoring something that can harm society as a whole.
Consider that Shopping does not carry something else controversial - pornography. Yet, you don't see conservatives get up in arms, demanding that Google start listing it on shopping. Odd, that.
Google is not interested in making money from selling pornography. That's a decision it has made. They could also make a decision to only make money from selling Kosher food, and you'd have no leg to stand on when criticising that.
A marketplace is not a town square. If a marketplace does not want to sell your product, it doesn't matter if the disagreement is political or economic. It's not censorship.
Just because someone can sell guns in America does not mean you are compelled to help them.
Just because you can participate in Nazi speech in America does not mean that it's a big controversy that Norderstrom or Goodwill refuses to carry Hitler Youth hoodies. Freedom of speech requires freedom from compelled speech.
1. search results
2. sponsored ads/links and Google shopping marketplace, which appear separately.
If Google chooses to not accept money from selling X, there will not be X items appearing in the sponsored links (2) section.
But the search itself (1) has always been intended to return the most relevant information, based on the key words.
Without any moral/political judgement, as long as it is legal.
1. Searching for guns and gun accessories in Google Search has, and continues to return relevant gun-related search results.
2. Searching for guns and gun accessories in Google Shopping[1] has had its search results reduced, hence the controversy.
[1] Notice how all of the screencaps[2] posted on Zero Hedge/etc, are of people having the Shopping search tab open.
[2] https://twitter.com/xavierdreyman/status/968272365741330433
There is a notion that Googles usefulness has made it a utility. If that utility chooses to censor, it’s worth discussing. The article I linked about Nazis are to explain the idea that censoring bad things can sometimes backfire. When you stop the bad people from assembling, how do you prevent the definition of bad to be changed in the future?
As a matter of fact, my original comment was about the direction we are going in. With departments dedicated towards weeding out fake news, Google is ignoring its own bias. YouTube is targeting conservative ideas. The Sandy Hook conspiracy theories are perhaps an example of good censorship. At which point in the future will Google censor the next genocide?
This is a fantastic argument against Silicon Valley - that the institutions that it created have too much power.
However, that is not the argument being made in this subthread. Having this argument requires consideration of the institutions that it replaced, and whether or not the concentration of so much market influence in a corporation is a good thing. That's the problem at hand, not the particular politics of such a corporation.
> YouTube is targeting conservative ideas. The Sandy Hook conspiracy theories are perhaps an example of good censorship. At which point in the future will Google censor the next genocide?
I am of the understanding that the problem Sandy Hook conspiracies is not their content, but their presentation - my understanding is that they libel, and accuse victims of the shooting of conspiracy and murder. This is, by many definitions, harassment, and is against the TOS.
> The article I linked about Nazis are to explain the idea that censoring bad things can sometimes backfire.
If we really want to go down that tangent, may I remind you that this strategy of dealing with Nazis backfired spectacularly in 1933? We allowed them to speak, and big surprise, that did not stop them from suppressing the speech of their opposition, as soon as they seized power. Not that anything else could be expected from a movement that is built on no foundation but violence.
Tolerance is not a suicide pact. [1]
[1] https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1...
I agree with you that Google should be able to omit whatever it wants, but I can't agree that "Shopping is not search". Google isn't directly making money on things people buy, it's selling ad space on its search engine. As best I can tell, the primary difference between "Shopping" and "Search" is that Shopping uses structured data from third parties while Search uses unstructured data and attempts to automatically determine semantic contents. From a consumer's perspective, it's still "search".
> Freedom of speech requires freedom from compelled speech.
As a libertarian (and a fairly extreme one at that), I completely agree with you. So would virtually all of my friends who consider themselves conservatives. Their immediate response to this argument would not be ideological, but practical - how is it fair to claim that Google has the right to refuse to participate in speech it deems inappropriate on one hand, while requiring a cake shop to produce a cake that vocally supports gay marriage?
This no longer seems like an issue of "should we compel people to participate in speech"; it's now an issue of "why do we compel speech in only some cases, all of which seem to align with the interests of the Democratic Party?"
> Google is not interested in making money from selling pornography.
This is exactly what I mean by the above. You can search for "porn" on Google Shopping today and get a variety of sexual devices modeled after the genitals of celebrity adult film actors. To my knowledge this has always been the case. As of last week, though, you couldn't get results for a "burgundy tank top" because that string contained the substring "gun".
Very few, if any, on the right are claiming that Google doesn't have the right to do what it wants with its own properties. What they're doing is pointing out the hypocrisy of aggressively blocking only what seems like only those things that are important to the "right", while simultaneously being seen as supporting using the power of government to force those on the right to bow to the demands of the left.
The bottom line is that the core value being exposed here for conservatives is "fairness". Regardless of whether the laws are moral or immoral, the perceived unequal application of those laws along ideological lines is antithetical to their worldview.
As best I can tell, "fairness" and "morality" are completely discrete concept to the right. Some on the right strongly believe that government has no place in legislating morality, others demand that they do so. Both of those groups, however, are outraged when they perceive that the power of government is being applied to the benefit of the left over the right.
From my libertarian perspective, it will be interesting to see how that is reconciled (or ignored) when it becomes general knowledge how the Trump administration has done the same from the other direction. It as, after all, what a large portion of his voters elected him to do. Will the right see it as "turnabout is fair play"? Will they take pleasure in placing the bootheel of government on the neck of the left the way they see it as having been applied to them? Maybe - just maybe - at the end of the day they will be unsettled enough by the implications of this that they'll demand that the power that has been given government and now used against both major ideological groups be revoked by whatever means necessary in order to prevent the escalation of the a cultural civil war where the power of the state itself is being used as the primary weapon.
I pray that it's the latter, but I honestly can't tell at this point.