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Comment by zpeti | Hacker News Reader

Soooo… The Who said the virus isn’t airborne initially. They said masks don’t work initially.

What’s your plan of action there? Google censors what the status quo asks them to and then flips and censors the other side the second they change their mind? Does that sound like a good world to you?

How exactly does long term discussion happen in that cases? Since basically by about April 2020 you’ve banned all pro mask discussion and anti mask discussion…

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Well we could create a new government organization that determines what the current best known truth is ("Department of Truth" say) and Google censors just remove anything that goes against the Department of Truth

Damn, what a great idea! Why hasn’t anyone thought of this yet?

Does Google need a government agency to determine what emails are or aren't spam? Why would it need that in this case instead, and do you really think that would be an improvement? This is a bad strawman.

Can you clarify if you are being sarcastic or not?

If they're bad at identifying misinformation, then I'll fault them for that. Has Google had a tendency to censor things on the basis of information that later turned out to be true? Your examples are the judgments of groups that aren't Google and judgments that I don't think the groups responsible for pushed for others to ever get censored for.

But that is precisely the lesson history taught us. Misinformation, fundamentally, cannot be identified. It's easy to say "oh, everyone who believed that was an idiot" when talking about Galileo being thrown in prison for heliocentrism. If he was alive today, we'd be calling him a "far-right conspiracy theorist" or something equally as nasty.

I can't understate how much I disagree with that being an unambiguous lesson of history. There's been plenty of places where misinformation was identified and pushed out in favor of better information. But mainly, this is about an individual company deciding whether or not to participate in helping spread (mis)information, not about the government choosing to jail someone. It's terrible that Galileo was jailed and that should not have happened, but I don't think free speech should mean that any specific newspaper was legally obligated to run any articles he wrote.

In the early days of the coronavirus, you couldn't use Google to find information at all because everyone other than the WHO was getting censored. I was using Bing for a while because their censorship was much slower.

> Has Google had a tendency to censor things on the basis of information that later turned out to be true

Yes. Youtube censored the lab leak hypothesis.

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