

What Does Google's Subtle Censorship Say About Us? - grellas
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/01/what-does-googles-subtle-censorship-say-about-us/70443/

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zmmmmm
Why is this being referred to so constantly as censorship?

Censorship is preventing someone else from speaking. Suggested keywords are
Google's speech to us. Unlike search index content, Google _is_ responsible
for their contents and will beheld accountable when they are inappropriate.
The only party being censored by filtering keywords is Google.

If you really, really, want to call this censorship then you have to also
apply a "safe-harbor" type principle to it where you remove responsibility
from Google for what the suggestions contain. I don't think anybody suggests
that would be a good idea. And I bet the same crowd bleating censorship would
be up in arms about finding inappropriate terms suggested if Google didn't do
this.

~~~
j_baker
On the other hand, the idea of search engine companies blocking autocomplete
keywords is a new concept that isn't taken into account by existing
definitions of censorship. Regardless of how you define censorship, the core
concept is that censorship is blocking content that is deemed inappropriate.
Google is essentially blocking content that is deemed inappropriate under some
standard, so therefore it is censorship.

English is a constantly evolving language. Words' definitions aren't set in
stone once they're entered into the dictionary.

~~~
hugh3
_Google is essentially blocking content that is deemed inappropriate under
some standard, so therefore it is censorship._

A fun exercise: what _else_ would count as censorship under this rather
expanded definition? For instance, if I run a bookstore then am I "censoring"
every book I don't carry?

~~~
j_baker
Are you not carrying those books because you deem them inappropriate or
because you simply don't have space for them all?

~~~
hugh3
What if I'm not carrying them because I don't think they're good?

~~~
j_baker
I don't know. What _if_ you're not carrying them because you don't think
they're good?

~~~
hugh3
I don't know, I didn't understand the point of the question in the first
place.

~~~
j_baker
Interesting because I didn't understand the point of _your_ question in the
first place either.

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Daniel14
-1 to this article. Google isn't blocking anything. No censorship, they're just not helping you get to presumably illegal sites anymore. Oooh, they're forcing you to press enter to get to hacked content! EVAAL! Seriously..

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xiaoma
"old people need" auto completes with "to die"

Sadly, this really does reflect on us, the vast number of English speaking
google users. Trying to remove all offensive reflections of the garbage people
type in is impossible though. It's not really bounded.

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saurik
I'm pretty certain that if Google had people /automatically/ running searches
for swear words, pornography, or BitTorrent sites they'd get a lot of people
fired from their jobs (possibly even automatically ;P) and possibly even
seized by the FBI.

Seriously: why does everyone assume that Google's autosearch result filtering
is designed by corporations or those with overly chaste minds (I totally
failed at coming up with a better word/phrase for this ;P) to mold the
Internet in their own image, and not as a way to protect users from being
unfairly beat down by those same interests randomly?

~~~
spot
It certainly makes sense that Autosuggest shouldn't pop up any "NSFW" results.
There's a difference between suggestion and answering. That explains why the
sex/curse words are dropped.

But what about the racist results? That's just as verboten in the office. And
talk of torrents doesn't qualify by this standard.

~~~
Natsu
Until we can build a computer that understands English (not to mention every
_other_ language they offer autocomplete in) or convince everyone to stop
searching for such things, I don't think it's possible for Google to filter
out all the naughty/bad/copyright infringing suggestions.

My take on it is that they're doing their best to remove suggestions that are
likely to cause them trouble, particularly the trouble they might be in if
someone were to make a claim against them for inducing copyright infringement.

I wonder if they'd get any mileage out of changing the name? But I'm not sure
if they could find something to make it clear that Google is saying that these
searches are popular, not that these searches are endorsed by Google.

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anonymoushn
This has happened for a long time for other strings. If you begin typing "why
are musl" "limey" or "nigg" then google will stop autocompleting.
Interestingly, if you begin typing "why are chris" "why are jew" or "wop" then
it will continue autocompleting.

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trotsky
I'm surprised the atlantic fell for this story.

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yanw
People need to be more carful with the terminology, not every editorial
exercise is 'censorship'. Google isn't hosting the content nor have they
stopped indexing and linking to it.

As for the 'torrent' thing, IP lawyers might be arguing that Google is helping
users commit infringement via Autocomplete specifically with how instant
displays results, also it might be part of Google's negations with record
companies and film studios to get their content.

~~~
JeanPierre
_As for the 'torrent' thing, IP lawyers might be arguing that Google is
helping users commit infringement via Autocomplete specifically with how
instant displays results_

The same argument is used against guns and dangerous knives as well, as they
help users commit murders. The arguments against banning of guns is that "it
is not the gun that kills, it is the person" and "if they really wanted to
kill, they would have found another way". (Whether these arguments are good or
not is another debate...)

I have not really done that much research on the gun debate, but couldn't
those arguments be applied to this case as well?

~~~
Stormbringer
If you want to do some research into the gun debate, a good place to start is
the movie "Bowling for Columbine". Some people will think of it as an extreme
left-wing-nutjob propaganda piece, but my recollection of the movie is not
that it hammers you with a conclusion, but that it presents a bunch of
different scenarios that are all 'odd' in their own way. Accusing BfC of being
a propaganda piece is like calling Borat a propaganda piece, stylistically
they are quite similar.

Anyway, one of the things that really struck me about that movie was the
difference in gun related deaths (per head of population) in Canada and the
U.S. Basically both countries have buttloads of guns and the justification in
both is that they are for 'hunting'. I don't remember the exact figures, but
the deaths per 1000 from guns was enormously much higher in the U.S. than in
Canada. Moore doesn't give an answer to that dilemma per se, but he does throw
it out there for people to think about and make up their own minds. Frankly,
if that is propaganda, I think the U.S. and the internet in general need a lot
more of it.

\-----

As for the guns debate, you could make an analogy to poison, where you say
that poisons are sold at the supermarket, so why not sell guns at the
supermarket too? I guess the reply would be that the poisons that are sold
invariably have some other practical use, e.g. cleaning products. Whereas guns
are pretty much designed with the express and only purpose of killing stuff.

Then the gun-nut will reply "oh, there's lots of other uses for a gun, like
sport (target practice), hunting and personal defense as a deterrent". The
problem isn't that those things are wrong, the problem is that - unlike pretty
much every other country in the world with guns - people in the U.S. don't
seem to stop at deterrent, they are much more likely to use the 'personal
defense' guns to try to kill someone else.

Why is that?

What is it about the U.S. that as soon as they get a gun in their hand they
want to go 'pop a cap in yo ass'?

And why doesn't that happen in Canada?

Some of the scenarios I remember from the movie that were presented:

The bank that gives you a shotgun when you open an account

The mall store(?) that was selling ammo in massive aisles

The five year old that took a handgun to school and shot one of his class-
mates dead

The Columbine massacre

The gun lobby holding a big pro-guns rally in Columbine immediately after the
massacre

Moore harassing Charlton Heston (figurehead of the gun lobby) (this one was
most like a scene from Borat - it was an uncomfortable 'excuse me while I
invade your personal' thing and went on for ages)

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maeon3
We better shutdown and close all the libraries and bookstores too. The page-
to-eye data transfer protocols are evil, we need to crack down on this kind of
piracy.

