Comment by swiftcoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swiftcoder | Hacker News Reader

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> Yandex does Putin's bidding much much further than any western search engine ever meddled with their results for political purposes. Yandex employees' lives would be actively at risk if they didn't

Does media manipulation score higher/lower on your moral index than the widespread domestic spying the US has forced tech companies to be complicit in?

Not that media manipulation by the US government is exactly an unheard of event (at least as far back as the whole WMDs in Iraq scandal).

> Sometimes I really wish a hard reality check would meet the people making such comments from the comfort of their programming chair or from thousands of kilometers away

Look, I'm American myself, and have as keen a dislike of Russia's foreign and domestic policies as the next guy. But it is at best wildly hypocritical to suggest that US tech firms are not subject to government interference, in a manner that may be detrimental to their customers.

> But it is at best wildly hypocritical to suggest that US tech firms are not subject to government interference

It is very different degree of subjection where we talk about country that have laws, politics, сourts, journalism, all that stuff, and country, where if you dare even to complain about some wild highly illegal stuff that the kgb demands corporation that you working for to do, you end up getting 30 years in prison for treason, falling out of the window, getting poisoned by some chemical weapon, and even then you will be considering yourself a lucky man because nothing very, very bad had happened to your family.

> where we talk about country that have laws, politics, сourts, journalism, all that stuff

Post patriot act, we have none of those things in instances where the government invokes national security (for example, a national security letter can compel release of data without a court order, and comes with a pretty serious gag order)

I'm not American. You can say that Murica is up to no good, but RuZZia is definitely up to much much worse. It's way more oppressive and repressive by an order of magnitude. Employees at Yandex have to censor stuff about Putin and the war (see egorfine's screenshot) or they risk getting defenestrated, death by polonium, or death by torture. There is no "First Amendment". Putin's wishes are the law. He is trying very hard to destroy liberal democracies in Europe and around the world.

Of course Google is morally much better than Yandex. What sane mind would even question this? The fact that I'm getting downvoted just shows how out of touch this bubble is with real life.

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