How can they be held to account when they inevitably get it wrong?
Where will the highly-transparent write-ups detailing moderation decisions be published?
Seems like if Google actually gave a damn about the morality of censorship as some sort of 'neccessary evil' you'd be able to answer these questions easily^. Until then, it's a non-starter in my book.
It’s debateless policies that are spreading on the world stage. People need to rise up against a small group of individuals located in Menlo Park, CA who are demonstrably and utterly out of the touch with the rest of the world, but deciding how and what information flows. These people have no idea how agriculture works or how people live in Indonesia or what conflicts are going on in Namibia.
But I don't have to trust that Google won't suppress valid positions drive since there are many alternatives for sharing information beyond Google drive, which isn't meant to primarily host public content in any case.
You'll be disturbed to learn then that every major social network heavily censors information in an opaque manner.
What about the elderly or others who might only know how to use Facebook or YouTube? Fuck em?
But on the topic of social network news filtering, anyone who uses a social network is implicitly consenting to that network's filtering of information.
Once upon a time, most people got their news from a single newspaper - well informed people might read several papers as well as newsmagazines but even this implied a lot of filtering. Those newspapers filtered the news more heavily than any present network.
In what way does this make censorship the morally right thing to do? Think of all the evil large corporations have tried to justify with statements like that^ over the years.
"Our billions of users should have known we were gonna pull the wool over their eyes!"