Censorship by Google | Hacker News Reader

Censorship by Google

wikipedia.org

59 pointsbillme17 comments

This is far too generic and popular a topic for a Wikipedia page to make a good HN post about it. See recent explanations at:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22990237

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23117614

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23089041

When I say generic and popular, here's what I mean: the #1 and #4 stories on HN yesterday were about this theme: https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2020-05-18. Even apart from the Wikipedia aspect, good HN submissions on a theme like this need to meet two criteria:

(1) It needs to not be generic - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

(2) It needs Significant New Information (SNI) - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

When the theme is one of the hottest controversies of the moment, multiply all of the above 10x.

If you're worried that this means we're censoring Google-censorship stories, we're not, and HN search is your friend:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Censorship by one company isn't specific?

Not when it has been discussed many times from many angles. And probably not when the company is a planet.

HN discussion thrives when there are details for the mind to sink its teeth into. This actually brings up another point: lists. Lists don't make good HN submissions. See previous explanations: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Ah, ok. So an article about a specific incident or a specific, small subsidiary would work?

A specific incident, yes. Whether it's a small subsidiary or not probably is a red herring, unless there's something unexpected about that small subsidiary being involved in such a thing.

Really, though, this is just about avoiding repetition. The first principle of HN is curiosity. Everything else follows from that (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). Curiosity withers under repetition (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). Generic discussions are bad because they're repetitive. There's a close relationship between genericness and repetition: generic is what you get when you take a bunch of things that have been seen and heard before, and blend them in a blender.

When a topic has been repeated enough to become generic, SNI is our only friend (see link upthread). That's basically the same as your specific incident. By the way, these specific incidents quickly become generic in their own right. An ongoing example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223219

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221264

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23213213

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23172564

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23232115

(those are just the ones with significant comments that I happen to know about)

Edit - by the way, it has taken years to hammer out these principles to the point that they've become building blocks of moderation that can be linked to and expressed in clear, concrete ways. I think it's probably time to collect this material into a more orderly form.

For what it’s worth, me posting like to the Wikipedia page was the result of a random Google search trying to find examples of new Google SERP features; Google search being...

[new message in Google search -"support.google.com"]

...with results limited to the past 24-hours. I had not even heard of the YouTube issue and was honestly surprised how much information was on wiki’s about Google censorship.

All that said, lol, didn’t have an issue with your reasoning, and when I saw how fast the post was climbing wasn’t shocked to see it fall just as fast as it happens all the time and you’d pinned your comment too.

Planet? Am i living on ABC now?

We are all living on ABC now. (what's ABC?)

https://abc.xyz/ (because Planet Google?)

One big example was Google's censorship during the 2016 American election. The autocomplete suggestions were wildly different than every other major search engine (DDG, Bing, etc.). Typing "Crooked" into every other search engine would suggest first the completion "Crooked Hillary". Searching on google about the Wikileaks Clinton email server leaks wouldn't yield results that would take you to the links. Most notably, the Chrome browser would try to divert you from the website entirely claiming that wikileaks was unsafe to visit.

I'm sure there are plenty more examples and I'm not attempting to portray any particular motive or larger scheme, but there is boatloads of evidence that Google censors political information and news during American elections. For all the talk of Russian interference, you'd think we'd talk more about Google's interference.

Is it that Google "censored" it or that other search engines were engineered into posting astroturfed content?

I mean, maybe the proper link would be to crooked.com?

Some of this censorship seems to be at the request of various governments. For example the "right to be forgotten" in some EU countries. What do people expect Google to do in such cases?

Stating the obvious, Google’s response depends on the context, that being: what Google makes of the request, the country, changes requested, demand for Google in that country, blowback from other countries, etc.

Unless Internet is available via a connection not controlled by a given country, which would be hard given even satellites report to countries — and the end user had a safe way to access the connection without upsetting the country they’re in, including if they’re in the ocean, since (most) boats & airplanes are still bound to a given country and/or country space the happen to be in.

Even they removed search suggestions for "黃色" (Yellow).

It's related to the color of the Hong Kong protests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Economic_Circle

Will the wiki link be censored if it mentions the censored stuff?

Appears Google even suggests it, or at least that’s how I ran across it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23242571

Its a good article

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