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Comment by gethesmane | Hacker News Reader

Seems pretty journalistic to me.

You might want to think about what the basic definition of "journalism" is, then. And how maintaining a relentlessly detailed, universally accessible dossier on the 1 percent of the population that qualifies as truly notable persons (such as politicians or notorious criminals) -- i.e. what traditional "journalists" do -- is in fact, quite different from ...

maintaining such a dossier on everyone, which is what Google does.

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From a legal and censorship standpoint, I absolutely want entities like Google search to be defined as journalists.

Just because something falls under a legal classification, it doesn't mean we'd start calling Google search a journalist in colloquial usage.

It sounds like you see no problem with selectively manipulating the English language to drum up support for legal outcomes "absolutely want" to happen, then.

It's not manipulating the English language, though. It's merely interpreting the law in a way that's favorable to someone's particular interest. As I said, no one would seriously start calling Google a "journalist" in colloquial usage. Calling them a "journalist" in a legal sense is an entirely different thing, and legal definitions of things are already often unintuitive from a "pure English" sense.

The issue is that Google claims to be a "journalist" when it thinks it prevents them from having to do what they don't want to do (delist things), and then claims to be "just a platform" when it thinks it prevents them from having to do what they don't want to do (take responsibility for content on their platforms).

Google wants it both ways, in whichever way is momentarily convenient. Almost everyone's comments on Right To Be Forgotten in this thread miss that key issue.

I don't really see a problem with that concept in a general sense. Google should absolutely use the law to its advantage wherever it can. We as citizens (who presumably are able to influence our elected representatives) need to close loopholes in those laws when Google uses them to do things we don't like.

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