Google Drive bans distribution of “misleading content”

The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like ... and get upset when they don't host the stuff we do like.

Consumers aren't rational. Neither are their demands.

I'm probably no more rational than anyone else, but I'm honest that I sure as hell don't want to give money to a service that is happy to host some violent folks content / garbage...

>Turns out, not even Apple is that messiah

They were, just no longer the same under Tim Cook.

I dont want to derail the discussion into another political debate but my thesis, is that some ideology spread like plague in Silicon Valley. The Good vs Evil. As the OP said Google stated off being good, but somewhere along the line the definition of Good got twisted a little bit. They keep thinking they were so righteous they literally started a crusade or witch-hunt ( so to speak ).

And it is in some way interesting because it rhymes with many historical events.

I would much rather live with censorship that can be removed by withholding dollars vs one that requires votes.

Just look at the puritanical rules concerning language and sexuality forced on broadcasters. Those rules are decades old and outdated and will likely remain forever.

When companies fuck up on censorship, the results seem to last only a few years. When governments fuck up, the consequences echo for multiple lifetimes.

What makes you think the government is that Messiah? Is it likely, in your view, that the government will go out of their way to "encourage the spread of misinformation"? I'm not seeing that happening.

> That if you make a 'free speech' drive/repository place that's widely available, it will host the absolute worst of the human race.

That's only due to selection effects. If being open were the default then they'd be diluted among all the other people. ISPs themselves, (older) reddit, 4chan all serve as examples that the people you don't want to talk to can be mostly siloed off to some corner and you can have your own corner where you can have fun. Things only get problematic once you add amplification mechanisms like twitter and facebook feeds or reddit's frontpage.

> For one thing, it's easy to say 'well we'd only take down illegal content'. But in practice there isn't such a bright line, there's lots of borderline stuff, authorities could rule something posted on your site illegal after the fact- lots of these situations are up to a prosecutor's judgement call. Would you risk jail to push the boundaries?

I don't see how that's an issue? They send a court order, you take down the content is a perfectly reasonable default procedure. For some categories of content there already exist specific laws which require takedown on notification without a court order, which exactly depends on jurisdiction of course, in most places that would be at least copyright takedowns and child porn.

> Pretty soon the FBI & CIA start contacting you about some of the actual or borderline illegal content being hosted on Free Speech Drive. Do you want to deal with that?

That's pretty much what telcos have to deal with for example. Supposedly 4chan also gets requests from the FBI every now and then. It may be a nuisance, but not some insurmountable obstacle. For big players this shouldn't be an issue and smaller ones will fly under the radar most of the time anyway.

Also, having stricter policies doesn't make those problems go away. People will still post illegal content, but now in addition to dealing with the FBI you also need to deal with moderation policies, psychiatrists for your traumatized moderators (which you're making see that content) and endusers complaining about your policy covering X but not Y or your policy being inconsistently enforced or whatever.

Another wrinkle in all of this is that you can use free speech as a form of censorship.

For example, if someone says something you don't like, you can intimidate them into shutting up by, say, threatening to reveal their personal information, such as their legal identity, address of residence, and so on. On certain corners of the Internet, merely dropping dox is good enough to get randos (who won't even be affiliated with you, so +1 to plausible deniability) to harass someone you want to shut up.

A more technical variant of this is DDoS attacks. Instead of trying to intimidate someone into shutting up with threats of stochastic terrorism; you shout over them by sending a bunch of traffic to their site until the server crashes or they run out of money.

So even if you're a hardcore free speech extremist, you still need to embrace some level of "censoring the censors" if you want the Internet to actually be usable.

It's a real problem. It's easier to suppress such content, but the problem is, it just goes elsewhere where it is almost completely unchecked, and it just proliferates in much darker circles as a result, and we have even less exposure as to its true volume.

Maybe there should be more of an effort to reduce peoples' incentive to engage in that sort of behavior in the first place. Why do people join violent extremist groups? Why do people engage with CP? Why do terrorist groups exist? Is it just human nature? Is it a fact that with 7+ billion people we are destined to have millions of people engage in this behavior?

De-platforming horrible material is better than nothing, but it feels like whack-a-mole

a lot of people who say they want an absolute free speech drive/free speech host have never actually worked for a colocation/dedicated server/hosting ISP and seen how the sausage is made.

This is also probably why Google is advocating for the privacy sandbox and banning third-party-cookies, and staying ahead of the law tech-wise. Such that when the inevitable regulation of the playing field does come, they are sharing drinks and chuckling with the referees, while the other players are still struggling to figure out what their game plan is.

It's also easier for FB/etc to push for laws to be written when they can pour millions into a PAC to get their ideal language into those bills, if not straight up write sections themselves. They can lobby for fines that are lower than profit from acting in bad faith or anti-competitively (who even knows how much money FB saved by buying out Instagram/etc), they can run their own disinformation or targeted campaigns to sway public opinion, or simply minimize anything on their platform to hide it from users. There's a massive power imbalance there between a regular voter and Zuckerberg/etc, even an imbalance between a regular voters who can or cannot vote early or by mail.

I support regulating these groups but that must be done within the right assigned via the constitution, existing precedent where available, and in depth knowledge of how these companies operate and how the tech influences consumers. It's complicated.

Imagine if Britain had this same technology when the USA was founded... It of course would have quickly cracked down on communications and it would have done so in the name of "peace" and "what's right"...

This idea that thinking critically of a government and even believing that perhaps the government as it stands today is not the government "of and for the people" (sure could be interpreted as anti-democracy by that same corrupt government)... And maybe that's not correct, but who is the government to say that we can or cannot challenge them in public discourse as it is supposedly protected under the first amendment?

This is indeed an insanely slippery slope and people willing to trade their freedoms because they think it's for the ultimate good, I think are really making a mistake... it's not difficult to understand that this is one of the first steps of an actual fundamentally corrupt government... This is easily open to abuse and vast interpretation.

Something similar that is happening now is the Ivermectin discussion, which right now, to some sounds as crazy as the lab leak, to some, sounded a few months ago. So we have learned nothing from the lab leak debacle.

I remember the original theory going round that was getting removed being that it was a lab leak of a bioweapon not the current theory that it was more normal 'gain of function' research that got out. Those are two very different accusations.

There is a distinction between discussing a theory, and presenting it as the truth with no evidence.

Not a distinction I imagine automated moderation systems are going to manage well, of course, but it exists.

Also, what if the content wasn't racist when you wrote it?

The Terms of Service are written broadly and that's on purpose so that Google can take the liberty of interpreting things however they please. Ultimately, it comes down to the culture of the team that deals with content scanning and take-down requests. I'm willing to bet money that it is staffed by Progressive Bay-Area folks and the implications should be self evident.

Even more problematic is the difficulty current algorithms have in distinguishing "engaging" in a certain class of speech acts from studying said class. This requires a subtlety of parsing humans are (sometimes) capable of, but machines still struggle with.

I looked closely but I cannot find anything that says that paying customers are excluded. So I would assume it is included.

It makes sense, though, to enforce one single policy: otherwise, just becoming a paying customer would be a loophole to circumvent phishing etc policies.

I guess the crux here is when, exactly, they start scanning the content. Is that perhaps the moment the content is first shared?

It doesn’t seem to be documented.

> If so google is actually scanning what is supposed to be private information.

Am I just too cynical or are you naive for thinking they aren't datamining absolutely anything they can get their hands on?

If it's not end-to-end encrypted, it's not private from Google.

Google can and will scan anything you feed it.

That's crazy.

Twice in the last week a comment of mine got blocked on Facebook for violating policies. In the first case, I posted a link to an EPA website and a screenshot of a graph posted on it, showing a reduction in smog in the last 10 years compared to 1987. In the second, I pasted a screenshot of something from the CDC's COVID Tracking site and a link to a British research paper on the efficacy of the vaccines wrt the delta variant. In the second case, my link was broken somehow, which might have contributed to the problem somehow?

They never went back up.

"We have recently been notified of a potential policy violation and after a thorough review of the video materials uploaded, it has been determined that the content is misleading and contradicts official government records. As a result of this decision, you access terminating to Youtube and other Google products, including Gmail, has been terminated. The decisions is final. This message is auto-generated"

“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”

Lab leak hypothesis.

N95 masks were never useless and Fauci should be seen as a monster.

What I don't understand is why there were no nations giving away n95 masks and education on how to wear it. It seems like we hivemind to the unsustainable lockdowns.

Well, we only have to go back a year, and you are saying the Trump admin is the only one speaking truth…

I find it insane that Silicon Valley companies have such short memories, and can’t even comprehend that 1 year ago the same policies would have resulted in banning anything Trump disagreed with.

Especially as the news about the election fraud slowly rolls out across multiple states...

As you've mentioned, the notion that you need an alternative to live a healthy, happy life is untrue.

How do we explain this to the world?