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The New Censorship: 'How Did Google Become The Internet's Censor and Master Manipulator?' (usnews.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Robert Epstein from U.S. News and World Report writes an article describing how Google has become the internet's censor and master manipulator. He writes about the company's nine different blacklists that impact our lives: autocomplete blacklist, Google Maps blacklist, YouTube blacklist, Google account blacklist, Google News blacklist, Google AdWords blacklist, Google AdSense blacklist, search engine blacklist, and quarantine list. The autocomplete blacklist filters out select phrases like profanities and other controversial terms like "torrent," "bisexual" and "penis." It can also be used to protect or discredit political candidates. For example, at the moment autocomplete shows you "Ted" (for former GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz) when you type "lying," but it will not show you "Hillary" when you type "crooked." While Google Maps photographs your home for everyone to see, Google maintains a list of properties it either blacks out or blurs out in its images depending on the property, e.g. military installations or wealthy residences. Epstein makes the case that while YouTube allows users to flag videos, Google employees seem far more apt to ban politically conservative videos than liberal ones. As for the Google account blacklist, you may lose access to a number of Google's products, which are all bundled into one account as of a couple of years ago, if you violate Google's terms of service agreement because Google reserves the right to "stop providing Services to you ... at any time." Google is the largest news aggregator in the world via Google News. Epstein writes, "Selective blacklisting of news sources is a powerful way of promoting a political, religious or moral agenda, with no one the wiser." Google can easily put a business out of business if a Google executive decides your business or industry doesn't meet its moral standards and revokes a business' access to Google AdWords, which makes up 70 percent of Google's $80 billion in annual revenue. Recently, Google blacklisted an entire industry -- companies providing high-interest "payday" loans. If your website has been approved by AdWords, Google's search engine is what ultimately determines the success of your business as its algorithms can be tweaked and search rankings can be manipulated, which may ruin businesses. Epstein makes an interesting case for how Google has become the internet's censor and master manipulator. Given Google's online dominance, do you think Google should be regulated like a public utility?
Google is simply buckling under the social, political and commercial pressures - it's completely external. I'm sure Google doesn't *want* to spend dollars having to dig through text to find things that someone finds offensive but we demanded it and they delivered it. Don't shoot the messenger.
This reads as "You did what I asked? YOU IDIOT!!"
Everyone decided that censorship was OK when it wasn't the government doing it, so nobody tried to stop Google.
Stop enriching Google already. Stop sending them the contents of all your emails, stop giving them info about everything you search for, block their tracking shit that's all over the web, use alternate map services, don't send them your real time location throughout the day, etc.
If enough people don't want Google knowing every fucking shred of personal info about them, and having increasing control over their view of the world, then stop using them and Google withers and dies.
If you're going to keep using Google services? Fine, but then do please STFU when down the road you don't like the world you created.
Ever thought the no-fly list that you cannot see and cannot change is a bunch of bullshit?
Well right now a number of house members in the U.S. are having a sit-in to try and base gun control around that same list.
May as well integrate the YouTube block-list while you're at it I guess.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Google provides a very popular, but not the only WWW indexing and search service. Personally i have moved on to DuckDuckGO because of their commitment to user privacy.
Good. We need less guns, not more.
Nobody should be able to walk into a Walmart and walk out with a cart full of machine guns and ammo.
No other "civilized" society accepts this nonsense and neither should the US.
Then you should get the constitution amended.
That's another aspect of "civilized" societies - you can't just pick-and-choose which rules to break.
People have been attempting to control information and the social discourse since always. This is not new.
And whether you like it or not for whatever your political reason... consider that corruption that serves your political interests TODAY can be turned against you tomorrow.
Don't be that dumb. You either believe in democracy which requires an open exchange of information or you don't and we trend towards kings, aristos, and various other elites that will just control your life for you. And again... while you might like that idea now because you assume said aristos will hold your values... consider that they might not in the future. And at that point your opinion will be literally worthless.
Stop it now while your vote counts. Or your hypocritical complaint later will be a joke.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
You meant to write *legally* gotten gun, right?
-- I ain't broke, but I'm badly bent.
Just to see how far this goes, I typed in "dipshit" and Google didn't autosuggest "Robert Epstein"! That's an omission that must be corrected!
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
It gets really tiresome seeing people attempt to claim that all these massive corporations and immensely wealthy people are just powerless to do anything and can't be held responsible for their own actions. Google does what they do for the same reason other powerful companies do, which is nefarious and immoral at best. It should take you all of about 10 seconds of studying the CISPA web campaign to realize that these companies have immense power on politics because masses of people can tune into the message. "Hillary want's us to censor" would have probably ended up in a Sanders candidacy, but Google knows where the power and money should be for them (read Sergey and Larry) to get the best bang for their buck.
Reality is that people don't get rich and powerful by being stupid. We can however say that the opposite is true, so the poor and ignorant will remain so. It's really really easy to get the ignorant to remain that way too.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Autocomplete blacklist?
So, he's complaining that if you want to search for "Crooked Hillary," you have to type the whole phrase, it won't complete it for you?
Oh, your aching fingers, evil google making you have to type another seven whole characters. I am so sorry you have to do all that extra work.
By the way, it's not really news. Here's Boing-boing in 2010: http://boingboing.net/2010/09/... (pointing to a list at 2600.com: http://www.2600.com/googleblac... )
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Oh bullshit. This is what DNS was for. People use Google as DNS now. People type domain names into the google search box all the time. Then there is the facebookernet. Google and facebook, that's it now, no need for DNS really.
Because you were all sucked in by the name. There were plenty of perfectly good search engines before google. But because you were all sucked in by the name, they all pretty much died. dogpile.com used to use dozens of search engines, now like many others, they're just a google proxy, like Yandex's duckduckgo.
I was able to navigate the web just fine from 1990 to 2001 before people let google take over the internet.
Fucking kids, get off my non-existent lawn.
I'm not a fan of regulation, but it might be required in order to break the stranglehold one company gets on a particular industry. The example I always think of is John D. Rockefeller and his company, Standard Oil, which was ultimately broken up into smaller companies due to its absolute domination of the industry which it used to destroy competitors. Google may be in line for at least an investigation into whether it's gotten too big for market competition. Facebook as well.
First, if you want to search "Hillary indictment" but you're so lazy that you complain if Google doesn't finish typing after you have typed the first nine letters of the search, you're seriously lazy.
Second, when I type "Hillary in" to the google search box, its first suggested autocompletion is "Hillary indictment" and the second is "Hillary indictment news". So, your google seems to be different than mine.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
In my opinion you've missed the point of Epstein's article.
Epstein contends (and I agree) that Google's services are so pervasive that it really has taken on the role of a public utility, while still being an ordinary commercial enterprise without any responsibility whatsoever to anyone except their shareholders.
By its very nature, Google *cannot* be transparent about its page-rank algorithm because the instant it is, every SEO con artist in existence will proceed to abuse that knowledge and undermine the quality and usefulness of Google's search results.
The bottom line is: Google is a company that provides a service that's as essential as power, water, roads, trash collection and sanitation that's beyond oversight and cannot (ever) be transparent about its service. How would you like that same level of transparency and total un-accountability with other utilities?
What you call "freedom", I call risky concentration of power without checks, balances, or oversight. An appeal to "freedom" is, I think, an oversimplification. Why not allow utility companies to switch off the power, the water supply, or block the sewers if they it would be in their corporate interests to do so? When water authorities ration water usage because supplies are running out, everyone is up in arms, but you'd like to lie down and take it if it's in the corporate rather than the public interest? After all, nothing stops you from buying bottled water, does it? Or installing a swimming pool as a backup water cistern, right? How about allowing the wastewater treatment plant to shut down the sewers in the city centre if somebody (perhaps a restaurant) dumps a load of fat down the sink that plays hob with their sewage treatment?
What Google does (and must do) to keep its services humming really does lead to injustice in individual cases.
To that extent I agree with Epstein. Where I disagree with Epstein is whether it's worth the price in this particular case. However, with Google, whilst transparency is impossible oversight isn't. We may well need regulations and oversight for search engines somewhere down the line.