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Comment by hereforphone | Hacker News Reader

In a sense, dangerous. Google has a history of (and currently practices) censoring viewpoints it disagrees with. Will its censorship reach extend from omitting / deprioritizing search results to entirely canceling those using its TLDs that it deems undesirable?

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Source? What i see, is that it's blocking illegal things.

Well, there is the Wikipedia article [1] but even there most of what it mentions could be considered hearsay, so I'll go with a couple others:

- 4chan's /pol/ board straight up doesn't show up. It's easy to directly go to a board by writing "4chan" and the correspondent letters, /pol/ is censored from the results though, this is most probably political in nature since even /b/ shows up.

- The "substitute" for the r/The_Donald subreddit at communities.win is similarly unreachable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google

> Wikipedia

Like what part would censor opinions ?

> 4chan

There sitemap is even wrong ? https://www.4chan.org/sitemap.xml It redirects to the http version. Also, i can't access the page without accepting the rules ( perhaps that's related?)

> communities.win

I found it with Google, but it really isn't SEO optimized even and it's backlinks ( low quality) + domain authority is really low: https://ahrefs.com/nl/backlink-checker

Additionally, the content seems to be misleading/untruthful. So that would bring down the trustworthiness of the entire site ( backlinks of similar sites). It's the same way spam is threated, by their organic links.

Backlinks include: conspiracies.win , cancelthiscompany.com, patriots.win, greatawakening.win, weekendgunnit.win, ...

A search engine is about finding usefull results. And while communities.win could be usefull for the ones that know it and they can find it through Google. I doubt many other people would even look for it or find it useful.

Anecdotally the same for other sites like KiwiFarms. I may not agree with all content posted on such sites, nor spend my day there, but I certainly don't believe in censoring unpopular opinions. There were also screenshots of Google censorship posted during the 2016 election that were concerning and I verified a subset of these myself.

Regardless of one's political and social viewpoints, we should stand united against censorship.

KiwiFarms is excluded for all the doxing and stalking material, not for "unpopular opinions".

KiwiFarms isn't the only example. And would you provide a source for your assertion?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms

> Kiwi Farms, formerly known as CWCki Forums, is an American Internet forum dedicated to the discussion of online figures and communities it deems "lolcows" (people who can be "milked for laughs"). The targets of threads are often subject to doxing and other forms of organized group trolling, harassment, and stalking, including real-life harassment by users.[2][3] Harassment stemming from Kiwi Farms has been implicated in the suicides of three people targeted by users of the site.[9]

Putting a reply here because HN won't let me reply to the other leaf comment. 1) Implicated by whom? 2) That KiwiFarms doxes, or that the doxing bothers people, wasn't my question. My question is where is it stated (convincingly) that doxing is the reason Google filters the results?

Censoring their search results is not the same as censoring domain names

Read the original comment again.

From reading that Wiki article, I can surmise that Google just dances in the middle ground to protect their profit stream. You could also say that corporate capitalism has no soul.

Sadly you might be right, depending on where you live. In the US free speech is still supposed to be free, and Google blocks a subset of results it deems undesirable.

Domains aren't like your Google account.

But they could be owned by a Google account if bought through the Google registrar.

What happens when that Google account gets locked or banned?

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