Either you're in favor of free speech or you're just partial about which content you want to censor. The activist crowd in the west lost all moral standing on this subject years ago.
Censorship that is meant to block all criticism of the current rulers to keep them in power forever is unlike all other kinds of censorship because it is self-referential and self-reinforcing.
If a government censors, say, sites that distribute pirated movies or sites that glamorise suicide, I can still protest against that ban or campaign to get a different government elected.
But if a government censors both those sites and my criticism of the ban, then that is a wholly different kind of censorship.
Making that distinction is not hypocrisy.
It reinforces the specific laws and rules they make and it reinforces obedience, lack of critical thinking and intransparency of the censorship decisions themselves.
I don't see how anyone could deny that censoring political opposition in general acts on a meta level and is therefore categorically different from all other stuff that gets censored.
It’s also worth noting that even if search results are censored, in the US model the websites can still be accessed (although US-based illegal websites can get shut down), whereas in the Chinese model the websites themselves are banned.
The second is that even if one were to accept that the models are similar, that doesn’t mean that google has to have both or have none. It could take any stance on what level of censorship (or pushing down in search rankings) is acceptable in what cases and choose what to do based on that.
For example google already tries to remove spam that tries to gain its rankings but I don’t see people complaining that Google’s rankings unfairly penalise these sites and suppress their “free speech.”
It might result in a resources problem (or storage and computing power), but theoretically it could even exhaustively apply to spam. Even spam would be indexed in a radical free speech database, but with good algorithms it'll just take longer to find because a very small (almost zero) people in the world algorithmically denote it as content of worth.
I don't think that's true.
Google (and any other search engine) is compelled by US law to take down content that violates copyright. In China, Google will be compelled by Chinese law to take down content that e.g. criticize the government. See the similarities?
Sure, you could argue that taking down copyright infringing content is ultimately good for society, while taking down content critical of the government is bad for society, and yes I am of that opinion myself.
But this is a subjective moral judgement, and not a universal truth. And just like there are people in the US who morally object to copyright enforcement, you will find people in China who do _not_ morally object to censorship, at all.
In any case, it's not like Google is making any _less_ information available to Chinese internet users by operating in China. Whatever will be censored was already inaccessible to Chinese internet users, because Baidu, Bing and so on are already applying the same censorship anyway.
Just because this is a fuzzy moral judgement it does not mean that one must choose an absolute (although this may be an easier position to hold), but rather (and this is what I am suggesting is likely to happen) they will choose somewhere in between, even if this is not a consistent position. Therefore it is silly to say things are the same when different people consider them different in different ways and those people may influence the decision of google to enter/leave the market or to change internal policies.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/16/17021714/james-damore-goo...
What? I thought the argument from the other end was always to deny these were facts. You are saying, yes, they are facts. But they are too volatile so we won't examine them?
The difference between the two opinions that is significant: one is an opinion in a legal ruling and therefore carries force of law.
I suggest this if only for practicality sake, as only fanatics are completely consistent with some set of edicts/ethics/beliefs/ So you need to be able to communicate and reason with people who are inconsistent.
As the old saying goes, behind every double standard is an unstated single standard.
The unstated single standard for the vast majority is "whatever works out best for me."