Google pulls Russian opposition leader's YouTube advert ahead of vote | Hacker News Reader

Google pulls Russian opposition leader's YouTube advert ahead of vote

reuters.com

98 pointsLopRabbit23 comments

Absolutely spineless from Google. It's no surprise they're planning to launch China-approved search as well.

Absolutely agree. But, they already telegraphed this by removing right wing and left wing political videos from the US their moderators deemed offensive. So, this is in the same vein.

You may say this person is more mainstream, from our perspective, but that's where freedom of speech comes from, either you allow all --or you allow yourself to be manipulated.

Just because Google has “editorial control” over their platforms, that doesn’t mean their editorial decisions are beyond reproach.

Demanding fair play from Google, Facebook and other large corporations is a losing strategy, especially if the government is not on your side. They have too much freedom to rank search results, advertisements and your feed items however they want to, up to the point where censorship is indistinguishable from their algorithms deciding that something is simply of no interest to you. You can't complain if your recommended videos feed is full of "cat videos" and has no political content you are interested in.

The real solution to censorship is federation. We are bad at making decentralized search engines, and projects like YaCy [1] have never been successful, partly because it is hard to make ranking algorithms decentralized. But projects like Mastodon [2], Pleroma [3] and PeerTube [4] already have made federated social networks where you can decide what you subscribe to and receive it regardless of someone else decisions. The technical part is simple and transparent and if your provider tries to censor the sources you like, you can always switch to another one or host it yourself.

[1] https://www.yacy.net/en/

[2] https://joinmastodon.org/

[3] https://pleroma.social/

[4] https://joinpeertube.org/

People are not asking for fair play, they are asking for what they consider "normal" politics to be allowed and all else denied.

That's not crazy. Normal is mainstream, and TV has always cleaved to only allowing mainstream ads no matter the costs involved.

How is that different from a 4 year old complaining that if everyone just listened to him, the world would be at peace ?

"Normal" politics is a perspective. Everyone has got a different perspective.

The only strategy is to take power away from politicians as much as possible.

Whatever our social or political opinion is on the matter it's irrelevant. This is just one more proof that there's no guaranteed continued access to information unless that information resides on our local storage, backed up and kept offline.

The videos are not removed and access is not terminated. The advertisement campaign is terminated, that's all.

Surely you have to backup your data, but this case has nothing to do with information access.

"The videos are not removed and access is not terminated."

The linked article clearly says that the videos were deleted.

FTA: "Navalny’s aide, Leonid Volkov, said in a social media post that Google deleted the videos after the Central Election Commission had sent a letter of complaint to Google about the advertisement — a demand Volkov called illegal. "

Here is the actual post by Leonid Volkov, already linked in this thread: https://www.facebook.com/leonid.m.volkov/posts/1935274903161... Seems like it is a misinterpretation or just sloppy wording on Reuters side.

The letter sent to Google is here: https://navalny.com/p/5949/ Video mentioned in the letter (you can see it in the scan) is still available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGhGMhSd99w

It is important that neither videos nor demonstration against proposed pension changes have anything to do with the vote.

Vote is simply an excuse used by the government to silence protest.

Leonid Volkov's post:

https://www.facebook.com/leonid.m.volkov/posts/1935274903161...

For those who might not understand the context where this is happening:

- Russian authorities plan to raise retirement age to 65 years, while the average life expectancy for men is 66.4 years. It means many people will pay pension tax for all their life and get almost nothing back. Navalny is planning large protest rallies against this and against Putin as well. They are unlikely to become big (judging by previous ones) - maybe some 20-40 000 people max but the government in Russia doesn't want to admit that there are people who are against it.

- Therefore, in most cities including Moscow rallies are not approved by local governments and will be considered illegal. It means participants will be arrested by the police and fined or get 10 to 30 days in prison (organisers can get up to additional 25 days).

- Also, on Sept. 9 there will be local elections in some regions and cities, but opposition candidates were not registered for them (this is one of the ways how Putin and his party wins elections - by allowing only weak candidates to take part in them). So September 9 is a perfect date for protests against this too.

- Opposition buys ads on Youtube to promote the rallies because most media are controlled by the government and only report how life will be better for seniors with new law and how everyone will win from it, and that most countries in Europe had raised retirement age too. So many people don't know about protests.

- Russian authorities sent a letter to Google demanding them to stop displaying ads because it is considered a political ads which is not allowed the day before elections (you cannot promote candidates the day before elections). But Youtube removed ads even in the regions where there are no elections.

> while the average life expectancy for men is 66.4 years

This is however life expectancy at birth. I.e. if you're born today, in average, you'll live to 66.4 years. Comparing this figure to pension age is not very useful, since this figure is heavily influenced by infant mortality (and also by registration practices for live births), and infants do not contribute into the pension system and if somebody dies in infancy, it doesn't matter what the pension age is, they wouldn't have a chance to benefit from it.

Properly estimating how the reform would influence people requires looking at life expectancies at more advanced ages - e.g. at 42 it's 27 years, and at 60 (current retirement age) it's 16 years. It's still a significant change, which people can be rightfully upset about, but making it sound like average person would just have little more than 1 year to live after 65 is wrong. More correct figure is almost 13 years.

Sorry for somewhat offtopic comment, but using life expectancy at birth to make conclusions about people of advanced age is just wrong IMHO.

Google can do this, it's their machines they executed the commands on but they can't do this and claim they are not a publisher and are not responsible for content.

Now you should be able to sue both the author and also sue google for publishing it because they absolutely are exercising editorial power over the content. They can't have it both ways - (Yeah I know they can because they have more money than god and laws are bought. Evil is what evil does).

after authorities complained that the videos would violate an election silence law before Sunday’s vote for regional governors, an aide to Navalny said on Saturday.

But videos don't violate election silence because pension changes is not even a matter of regional government.

Russia is authoritarian country. All elections are fake there.

Exactly. Winning candidates (like Putin) often don't take part in debates, don't make campaigns, don't meet with voters. But they are promoted by government-controlled TV and internet media. Competing candidates don't do anything at all and don't get promoted by TV. And finally, some candidates are not allowed to take part. It looks more like a scripted play where everyone knows who is going to win.

Fake news, I'm sure. (the ad, not the takedown)

Is it a some kind of joke about "fake news" censorship excuse?

Your meaning is unclear.

Hardly something new. That was going on since around 2005:

>Google tried to establish ties with Russian government in period of 2005-2010. We are talking about nothing less than first person accounts of people involved, certifying that Google was sending all kinds of "consultants" to Russian political establishment, training them in online campaigning. Simultaneously, pages of Russian political opposition did disappear in Google's search. In light of recent events, this should be subject to much scrutiny.

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