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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!!"
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.
I noticed the "google censor" effect just the other day when I went searching for some info on a piece of software that is probably considered to be "evil" because it helps aid the circumvention of copyright.
This is a *very* popular bit of software but oddly enough, Google's search returned almost no results.
Censorship?
I think it's pretty obvious.
There are ten Google Blacklists. Epstein failed to mention, perhaps deliberately, the Kenyan birth certificate blacklist.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Google Play bans Bomb Gaza
http://www.israelnationalnews....
http://www.channel4.com/news/b...
Google bans Whack The Hamas
http://jewishbusinessnews.com/...
Google Play bans Milo Tosser
https://twitter.com/riffraffga...
Google Play permanently bans developer of "Hilliar Clinton" game
http://www.breitbart.com/tech/...
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.
Back in 2012, Epstein's website got blocked by Google because it was hosting malware. He's hated Google ever since.
This is a way of taking advantage of the way the page-rank algorithm works, in that it counts "incoming links" (they're doing a weighted, iteratively calculated count, but lets keep things simple).
Left to its own, there would be little the page-rank algorithm can do against such obvious abuse of the algorithm to self-promote certain sites. Thus, in the best traditions of the unenlightened self-interest that so pervades our society, the wellspring of the Commons is poisoned. The best of it is that it's all "legal" (there is no law against). As a consequence the value of Google's search results is at risk, and with it the public service they provide.
Rather than seeking redress from the law (which simply doesn't offer any), Google decided to mete out its own kind of justice: it corrected the search rank of sites that do this downward (manually or otherwise) so that they were starved of traffic. The message Google sends with this is: pull this one on us and we'll bury you.
In cases of genuine abuse (websites inflating their rank through this kind of "Search Engine Optimization" I agree with this measure. Unfortunately downgrading a site's search rank is a powerful weapon which, even when used without malice, can lead to injustice against which there is no appeal. Simply because either people or algorithms that do the downranking will make mistakes.
Alas, our world is not perfect. On the whole however I prefer Google to protect its search algorithm from abuse by SEO con artists at the expense of killing the odd innocent website. Sorry but my interests are better served by having high-quality search results than by preventing injustice.
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.