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Comment by someonelse17 | Hacker News Reader

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Isn't it? It's hard to interpret https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/09/12/leaked-video-googl... otherwise.

The politics of private citizens are their own business and explicitly not the government's.

Furthermore even if that had any bearing on their search results whatever google presents on their own damn website is also none of the government's business.

It is if Google wants DMCA safe harbour protections

I'm not sure what's behind the recent prevalence to this theory but that is false.

Also we should all want section 230 protection it's what preserves free speech online and the principle on which the whole web economy is built.

I don't like the idea that Google or any other entity can control how I think by presenting only one side of a story when the other side may have a reasonable objection, because it does not fit the politics of the operators of a platform. This is within the spirit of free speech.

I think it fair to say that if Google wants to be a publisher, they should be held accountable to the content they publish. If they want to be a neutral platform, they should not favor any particular viewpoint

What you want and what the law allows are different things, also just don't let any entity control how you think.

As for 'being held accountable' as publisher, I'm sure you're aware of many publishers that favor one side or one "viewpoint" in fact it's most of them, and they aren't being held accountable for that because we live in a free country.

They (publishers) actually are held accountable for the stuff they publish (e.g., publishing copyrighted material w/o permission will land you in the courtroom). This is why FB/Twitter/YouTube do not want to be publishers. However, because of their approach to moderation, they could wander in those waters.

They're not held legally accountable for political views.

The copyright stuff applies to everyone already.

Not political views, but slander/libel - publishers are liable.

It's funny to hear someone only ever make this argument when what is being censored is conservative. If it were the opposite way, and they were blocking results on, say, the travel ban, or competing startups, people would be up in arms.

I don't know about the prevalence of other opinions but what I'm suggesting (and there are many legal precedents to support this) is that the first amendment shields them from this nonsense as well as any antitrust allegations and complains about how some entitles think they should be featured in their results.

Just because a company's leadership dislikes Trump doesn't mean they'll ruin the integrity of their product.

Maybe not intentionally, but as much as SV companies like to talk about unconsious biases causing discrimination, it never gets applied to supposedly neutral companies like Google that are currently being sued for how they discriminate against conservatives and white males. If their internal culture is constantly promoting liberal political ideals, would it really suprise you if the developers subconsciously create their products in a way that suppresses ideas they don't agree with? The same thing happened with Twitter where they were preventing only Republican Congress people from showing up on the news feed. They claimed to be neutral, yet somehow managed to implement an algorithm that affected 0 Democratic Congress people and a couple dozen Republican Congress people. Hopefully "Oops, it was the algorithm discriminating, not us" goes away as an excuse people accept.

I wouldn't find it suprising if Google punished conservative fake news more than liberal fake news. That said, I trust them infinitely more than the government. That's a huge conflict of interest, and the government has never been good at remaining impartial about anything. Just look at gerrymandering.

Even if google is biased against conservatives, how it that any of congress's business? The 1st amendment is still a thing, last time I checked.

I know a lot of conservatives who were also dismayed at Trump's election.

Trump doesn't stand for, or enjoy the support of, all conservatives. In fact quite a few of his policies and actions directly contravene long-held conservative principles, like free trade and staying out of internal business decisions.

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