Google Maps accused of leading users to fake abortion clinics | Hacker News Reader

Google Maps accused of leading users to fake abortion clinics

arstechnica.com

7 pointsPaulHoule13 comments

Google is undeniably leftist in its political orientation, so this must have been either the work of a pro-life employee or something that a pro-life hacker was able to do. What is absurd is to think that Google Maps intentionally did this.

It is bigger than that, there has been a long term trend to create false abortion clinics to dissuade people from having abortions. A coworker of mine who became a deacon in the Catholic Church volunteered at one.

There is certainly no master plan at Google to send women to fake abortion clinics, it is just another case of out-of-control spam. This situation has been going on for a very long time but it is much more salient to people since Roe was struck down.

It’s part of a general theme of people leaning on ‘big tech’ because they can. It compares to the concern that Facebook data could be subpoenaed to track down a woman having an abortion and is the same environment in which the RNC can persuade Google to allow unlimited political spam.

What's the difference between https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/06/24/former... and what happened here? Why are so many people happy about that but upset about this? It seems like a double standard.

how are they the same

They share an element of deception.

One of these is a one-time stunt, the other is thousands of storefronts that hope a women seeking an abortion will reach them first and they can talk them out of it.

I live close to a very liberal city (we call the high school ‘Evergreen State High’) that has 1 abortion clinic and 2 crisis pregnancy centers.

I don't think the differing scale explains this. It's not like people said the "one-time stunt" was wrong but they weren't going to get upset because it wasn't a big deal; they instead actively supported and condoned it.

This isn't a 1700s philosophy discussion. People aren't upset about this because of 'the element of deception'. It seems to me that someone playing a joke on a guy is very different from systematically trying to stop desperate people from exercising their right to bodily autonomy. Maybe that's just me though,

A closer example might be gun control activists running fake gun shops that sell fake guns and ammunition, possibly jiggered to endanger the user.

But crisis pregnancy centers don't perform fake abortions. It'd be more like a fake gun shop that didn't actually stock any guns, and instead just tried to talk anyone who showed up out of buying one.

I don't know what you see the double standard to be. Do you expect "tricking people into going somewhere" to be the kind of action where the only acceptable positions are to either be always against it, or always for it, regardless of the reason for doing it, or whether they agree or disagree with the target, or what the disagreement is about?

It's not a double standard to support tricking a pro-gun figure into appearing in a gun control ad, while also opposing Google leading people seeking an abortion toward organizations that will misinform them about abortion; it's just a standard. People who hold morally wrong positions are entitled to less courtesy and respect than those who hold morally upright positions, and many people believe being a pro-gun politician to be wrong, and seeking an abortion to be acceptable.

I see questions like yours a lot on HN, and I have a hard time imagining what system of belief might lead to someone asking something like that.

The double standard is "it's okay to trick people into going somewhere for political reasons I agree with, but not for political reasons I disagree with".

Ok, I'm arguing that that's not a double standard. You are not obligated to treat the opposite side of a dispute the same way you would treat your own side of a dispute, or would like them to be treated by others. This is just how disputes work.

Crisis Pregnancy Centers often provide a range of options for women. Just because they do not provide abortions does not make them fake. The care they provide is abortion adjacent - exactly the kind of thing a search engine would be expected to dig up for you.

What does it mean that women should have a choice, but then to only offer them one choice, or to jigger search engines to funnel their view down to a single choice?

Women can make up their own minds - they don't need heavy handed political zealots determining what they can and can't see.

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