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Comment by JAlexoid | Hacker News Reader

That's a horrible analogy.

While people can be physically only in one location, they do get their information from a variety of source online. Comparing Google to a town square is dumb, when you account that Facebook has much more engaged users than YouTube.

At the time of writing I'm reading stuff on Facebook, Reuters, Yahoo Finance, Twitter, Reddit and watching YouTube videos in between.(HN as well) I'm present on all of those "squares" at the same time.

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I guess people has a bit different view about how sticky platforms are. If I imagine that google would take a political side in the US election and ban all site and comments of the other side, my belief is that it would have a direct impact on the election results and there would be nothing that the banned party could do. Politics right now depend highly on being visible on google search, Youtube and google ad network. A small but noticeable portion of users would move out, but it would not be close enough to compensate the loss and the impact on the political climate would take years to recover.

I would like to be wrong on this and that google do not have this kind of power.

> If I imagine that google would take a political side in the US election

They did. Maybe not in public, but it has been communicated clearly to the employees:

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-googl...

While this is true, I do not think this applies to the point that GP was making wrt influencing election results. Taking a public stance and enforcing said stance on communication through their services is a far cry from an internal discussion within a company where most employees lean towards one side.

I'm not saying this is okay--it probably could've been conducted in a more (politically) inclusive manner. But my argument is that this doesn't apply to the GP.

Edit. Also of course the main post about comment censoring is troubling.

All analogies fail given certain conditions. However for the choice of which search engine to register with and which ad company to choose, most companies would choose G first. So, back to the analogy (which I found strange, but certainly not dumb) a company (or person) looking to be heard would certainly have far smaller reach if G actively blocked them from their services.

This analogy fails in principle.

For this analogy to be correct, there can be no equally populous squares. But there are equally populous squares.

The assumption was: "Anyone could easily choose to switch to hold demonstrations somewhere else, but the result of holding it where only 8% of people will see it will make that less of a choice for the ones organizing the event."

So, no. One square dominates viewership (ie the town square <-> Google). You can switch to another square (ddg) if you want, but you don't get the viewership that you'd want to get the reach that you need.

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