Add a Comment
Email This
Statistics
RE: An Actual Knock at the Door?
I absolutely agree with you about Google and it's role in our society. It doesn't matter about what slant their apparent censorship takes, what matters is that they seem to be deciding what people should be able to find on the 'net. As I've stated, they already censor web searches for communist China.
You have stated that MichNews' comments on Islam and Muslims are offensive, stupid bigotry, yet how are they substantially different than what starm has written on OmniNerd? The only difference is that angry rants and invective against Christians is politically correct, but the same rants directed against Islam is not. Criticism of- or even hatred- of a religion is not racism. Maybe the argument could be made that it was if all Muslims were Arabs, but the fact is the majority of the world's Muslims are not Arab- they are Persian, African, Indian, Indo-Europeans, Asian, etc. If folks can attack Christians and their words are not considered "hate speech" or bigoted, than it has to be the same for all religions. Either it's all okay, or none is. The slippery slope begins when you talk about Jews and Judaism. Judaism is the religion practised by the Jews. All Jews are, well Jewish. So, if one would attack Judaism, that's a religion. If you attack Jews, that's racism. Right? I think I've got that straight.
I perused the study by the PIPA and found things they stated as unequivocal fact that can be disputed, but that's another post. I also do not trust polls, they can be too easily slanted one way or the other, although I can not for the life of me wonder why someone would slant a poll, as it has been my experience that most people are unlikely to go "oh, well 75% of Americans think X, so I'll stop thinking Y and go with X." Or maybe they do. Plus, at least FOX never felt the need to ignore news in order to keep in the good graces of a dictator.
I also give a rat's ass what the rest of the world thinks, one way or another. The rest of world started WWI, stood by and let Hitler do as he pleased until he held Europe, was either communist or did nothing to stop the spread of communism- all the while hoping we'd take care of the problem while at the same time criticizing us. The rest of the world is tin-pot dictators, tyrants, or simply corrupt. The rest of the world rails against us over Iraq yet does nothing about the Sudan, or expects us to do something as long as we don't use force. The rest of the world criticizes Israel, the only functioning democracy in the Middle East that doesn't even have oil. The rest of the world gives a rats ass about the rest of the world. The rest of the world will merrily continue dancing towards the precipice, blaming the US for all of the world's ills, until the find themselves hanging by their fingertips over the edge, and once again they will expect us to pull them back. And we will, 'cause that's how we roll.
RSS
RE: An Actual Knock at the Door?
I have several points, not all of which relate specifically to this comment, but to the overall conversation. My response to the Google post in general comes last.
First, on FOX's slant, I'd refer everbody to this study by the progam on international policy attitudes, which shows that people who get most of their news from FOX are significantly more likely to have certain misperceptions about the war in Iraq than those who watch CNN, and far more likely than those who get most of their news from NPR or PBS. Now, there are almost certainly other factors involved there, but I do think the results say something about FOX. You might be right about their actual news coverage, as distinguished from their punditry, but really I think the key problem with the channel is precisely that coverage makes up a very small part of what they broadcast, and punditry (e.g. Hannity or O'Reily) makes up the lion's share.
Second, I think it's worth pointing out that at least some of what Google apparently objected to was not simply criticism of Islam. I didn't go look at all the stories, but I did look at several; one of the posts Google apparently had an issue with on MichNews contains the following:
America should deport all Muslims and invite no Muslims into the country. Muslims don’t integrate. Europe is realizing this. America is now inviting the disease. Muslims are apart unto themselves because of their cultic nature. They are not a politic. They are not a culture. They are a cult based upon a killing book—the Koran.
That's not criticism, that's offensive, stupid bigotry. I don't think that fact actually has any bearing on the rightness or wrongness on Google's action, which I'll get to in a second, but I think we should be clear that this isn't "news" in any meaningful sense, nor is it, at least in some cases, merely critical.
Finally, and more to the point, as I've already suggested I don't think that the content of the posts has much to do with whether Google should be picking and choosing. The question we have to ask, given Google's predominance, is whether it's their prerogative any longer to decide to take an action like this. If Google becomes, even by default, the way that people find information online, then their decision to remove these sources from their results is in effect a decision to deny, or at least limit, access to certain kinds and certain sources of information. The fact that some of what these sites say about particular issues is offensive (and, as the above quote demonstrates, it is) doesn't change the fact that removing them from results impacts only one side of the political spectrum in practice, if not by intent, and that's a problem.
I don't accept the category of "hate speech," as I think it forces us to make decisions we're not equipped to make about the intent of the speaker and the impact of what's said, and I think it's an imposition of free speech that we can't afford to make. The question we have to find an answer to now is whether Google (a) is simply a private company providing a service for profit, and thus entitled to make whatever calls it sees fit in order to maximize that profit– including removing content it thinks will offend its customers– or (b) has, by virtue of market dominance, become a de facto public service that has a responsibility to provide fair and equal access to information, regardless of slant. And that's a question that's much more complicated than any sort of "left vs. right" issues.
View Full Discussion