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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

Not the OP and I’m not directly involved with this as I’m not an US citizen, but this is straight up censorship. The Republicans are going to have a field-day with this come election season and they would be right. As metioned in the article, I think Brin was right when he fought behavior like this back in the day.

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I think it's nothing like censorship. They aren't restricting anyone's free speech. It is Google's platform and within their right to control the content displayed outside of organic search, in fact it's necessary. That's like saying the Wall Street Journal is censoring all my articles I submit to them they don't publish.

The WSJ it’s not the only place in town when it comes to Internet search, while Google effectively is the only search engine that counts. To go back to your metaphor, it’s like not being published by Pravda, which back in the day was the only newspaper that counted in the Soviet Union. That’s why a guy like Brin was correct in his value assessment.

Internet search isn't Google News, there are countless news outlets. Google News is still not radically political leaning and just an aggregator. None that implement any sane blacklisting could be completely bias free anyhow... It is logical and not censorship

The article just mentioned they are blacklisting material based on political views (as far as I can tell the great majority of the censored stuff is right-wing), can’t see how they’re not “politically leaning”. The Republican-led backlash will come back hard on them.

"Some of the websites Google appears to have targeted in Google News were conservative sites and blogs, according to documents reviewed by the Journal."

That is so vague and unsubstantiated. I don't come to that conclusion from looking at this article. How easy is it to replace conservative with liberal? It seems very likely.

> as far as I can tell the great majority of the censored stuff is right-wing

Don't mistake the majority of the whining for the majority of the censoring. The left-wing equivalents of Gateway Pundit aren't included in Google News, either (and they shouldn't be, to be clear). You just don't see Democratic Congressional reps complaining about that fact in bad faith.

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