Looks like they're giving China and similar countries a demo of their service offerings.
Silencing of Dissent as a Service
Silencing of Dissent as a Service
There are more publicly visible examples [0] of how China pressures Hollywood to make changes to movies in order to release films in China. Even changes to films not released (eg, Change A in order to release B).
I don’t see why they wouldn’t make similar demands to Google, but there’s no way for me to confirm or deny this. Technically it’s pretty hard for Google to prove they don’t censor stuff because of China unless they go fully open data, open source. And they can’t do that.
There are few tech companies that can be trusted. I hope Apache doesn’t break down.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/05/18/407619652/...
When the western nations got more assertive about regulating the internet then they give ideological justification for more authoritarian governments wanting to do the same. And so the corporations will stop resisting in order to do business with the more authoritarian governments.
No judgement. It's a very difficult situation for all involved which include the governements worried about their citizens information being all in the US, western nations worried about disinformation, and corporations that just want to do business.
Tangent: is it recency bias or some other unstated bias I may be unaware of, that there appears to be an increase in completely reasonable, and in-no-way inflammatory comments being downvoted for no ascertainable reason going on in the last few weeks?
/thinking out loud
A) The statements/arguments/facts in your comment are incorrect, but your conclusion is correct based on $something_else.
I don't want to vote up because if someone is factually wrong, or making their argument based on faulty logic, it can dilute a legitimate discussion. But can't deny that I have an emotional desire to vote it up.
B) The statements/arguments/facts in your comment are correct, but your conclusion is incorrect based on $something_else.
I don't want to vote up because someone can have and understand all the facts, but still be wrong. But I also want to encourage a healthy discourse with accurate facts.
C) Although I disagree with your overall conclusion, I think your argument is still worth considering.
I want to vote up, but also down
D) You are technically right, but you are being an asshole.
I want to encourage civil behavior, but if their argument has merit, I don't want to downvote.
I guess what I'm trying to say is: A simple up/down vote is a leaky abstraction. I'm not sure that adding more voting options is a good idea, but I'm also not convinced that a single up/down is good enough.
This also depends on the voting/commenting guidelines of the site you are on, obviously.
I hereby declare your comment "productive, in despair, scatterbrained yet True with a capital T despite me not believing in true things" upvoted! :)
I very rarely downvote a comment. I sometimes upvote two comments that disagree with each other because I feel both of them offered interesting evidence or insight.
OTOH, I often upvote comments because they are polite, reasonable and I agree with them. So, in that sense, my use of voting is asymmetric.
Sometimes I think I should downvote more often just to use voting consistently. But, it seems extremely negative to do that to someone.
Someone had an opinion and they expressed it. It can just sit there. Why should I try to suppress it? Maybe other people should be able to see it and react to it?
Because it is simply a completely bare dig at the company with nothing useful added?
What is it contributing to the discussion?
I’m far more worried (now) about the censorship of YouTube, etc.