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Comment by taytus | Hacker News Reader

>Gabbard insinuates the initial suspension was politically motivated, which seems hard to believe.

I'm not saying that she is right but it's not hard to believe at all.

For this to be malicious, it would be an incredibly risky decision by Google from a simple risk/reward standpoint. Gabbard is a huge long shot to win the Democratic nomination let alone the presidency. Putting their finger on the scale at this point in the election cycle to slightly disadvantage a candidate that in all likelihood won't matter is a huge gamble.

Considering what was exposed with the DNC, Press sources and the Clinton campaign last election, along with high level support from Google management and insiders, it's on the edge of conspiracy, but not beyond a reasonable realm of consideration.

Bernie Sanders had pretty massive grassroots and online support far before the mainstream media seemed to even notice he existed. To me, fingers on scales seems like just the way it's done nowadays.

It's called 'gaming the refs'.

It is a prominent tactic among certain american political circles that wish to claim that everyone else is abusing them while never actually believing in the system of rights, checks, and balances that they claim are being abused in the first place.

It's beyond hard to believe. It's laughable.

It's crazytown tin foil hat conspiracy theory level garbage to think a megacorp like google is out to get you personally

Exactly. Why would Google risk a political storm that will dwarf this (at least for now) very minor candidate's entire campaign many times over, in terms of importance and newsworthyness?

Google has been shown to interfere with results that don't align with the company's political values. It's harder to believe that this suspension WASN'T politically motivated.

No, they haven't.

Which of Tulsi Gabbard’s views don’t align with the “political values” of Google? Sorry if I’m misinformed but from what I’ve seen Tulsi seems like a very reasonable politician. She may be somewhat of an outsider in terms of foreign policy but overall she has pretty standard left-leaning positions and I’ve never heard her resort to extreme rhetoric (a rare quality in today’s politics).

If I’m buying into this logic I would expect Google to take similar action against other presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, who are much more vocal in spearheading policies that are against the corporate interests of large tech companies like Google. Have either of those candidates been censored?

Gabbard doesn't believe in identity politics, thinks we should avoid making Syria a quagmire, was a soldier, and has a homophobic Dad. The first makes her the enemy to the hard left, so she is criticized for the later.

>thinks we should avoid making Syria a quagmire

I think you accidentally misspelled "makes excuses for a tyrant while the blood is still dripping from his hands". Because you can be reasonable about not thinking that an invasion of Syria is a good idea and call Assad out on his war crimes. Most other candidates manage that just fine.

> "makes excuses for a tyrant while the blood is still dripping from his hands"

Precisely the argument used to support pretty much every war. Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba, Vietnam - it's all the same. Bad evil guy that needs to be killed by the good American empire. Only the dictator changes. How Americans fall for this every single time despite knowing well how disastrous the previous one was is beyond me.

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