
Google misdirects ISIS recruits – security or censorship? - morehuman
https://www.thememo.com/2016/10/03/google-isis-censorship-google-search-blocked-terms-terrorism-isis/
======
zerognowl
It's part of their Jigsaw initiative:
[https://jigsaw.google.com/](https://jigsaw.google.com/) Basically a rag tag
'justice squad' outfit bent on stamping out trolling and nefarious users.
Whether these redirects are justified is questionable, and one can argue
Google are a quick click away from doing this for other topics on a whim. So
if Google decides that smoking tobacco is bad, they could redirect me to
videos of people dying from lung cancer on Youtube. Essentially it's Google
playing big daddy and trying to have moral high ground. It works some of the
time, but not always.

------
tsukikage
The two are not, in fact, mutually exclusive.

The actually interesting question, for any given thing and context, is "is
censoring this thing in in this context a worthwhile tradeoff?"

This question is often hard to answer for each specific case - any answer that
actually addresses the issues is likely to be in the form of at least a list
of pros and cons if not a longer essay; certainly not a snappy one-sentence
slogan - and no general answer that definitively covers all things for all
contexts exists.

Anyone that tries to tell you otherwise is trying to sneak their politics into
your brain via the back door.

------
tbonza
Security. The alternative might be to let them make those choices then arrest
them later. Or hit them with a drone strike. The filtering approach seems more
compassionate.

