Google misdirects ISIS recruits – security or censorship?

https://www.thememo.com/2016/10/03/google-isis-censorship-google-search-blocked-terms-terrorism-isis/

by morehuman • 10 years ago

5 3 10 years ago

zerognowl• 10 years ago

It's part of their Jigsaw initiative: https://jigsaw.google.com/ Basically a rag tag 'justice squad' outfit bent on stamping out trolling and nefarious users. Whether these redirects are justified is questionable, and one can argue Google are a quick click away from doing this for other topics on a whim. So if Google decides that smoking tobacco is bad, they could redirect me to videos of people dying from lung cancer on Youtube. Essentially it's Google playing big daddy and trying to have moral high ground. It works some of the time, but not always.

tbonza• 10 years ago

Security. The alternative might be to let them make those choices then arrest them later. Or hit them with a drone strike. The filtering approach seems more compassionate.

tsukikage• 10 years ago

The two are not, in fact, mutually exclusive.

The actually interesting question, for any given thing and context, is "is censoring this thing in in this context a worthwhile tradeoff?"

This question is often hard to answer for each specific case - any answer that actually addresses the issues is likely to be in the form of at least a list of pros and cons if not a longer essay; certainly not a snappy one-sentence slogan - and no general answer that definitively covers all things for all contexts exists.

Anyone that tries to tell you otherwise is trying to sneak their politics into your brain via the back door.

Google misdirects ISIS recruits – security or censorship?

Related Stories