Politicians Whining About Censorship Are All Just Trying To Dictate The Terms Of Debate – Techdirt

from the just-knock-it-off-already dept

So, we just had a post mocking the Democrats for whining about Hulu refusing their issue ads, and falsely calling it censorship. And now we have Republicans issuing a bullshit blustery threat letter to Google not to limit searches for sketchy fake abortion centers.

If youre unaware, malicious anti-abortion folks have set up fake abortion centers, which they call crisis pregnancy centers, that are masquerading as actual abortion providers, but which are only there to lie to vulnerable patients about their options, and push them to give birth. Last month, Democrats (again, deeply questionably) told Google that it should demote search results pointing to these misleading centers when people are searching for abortions. As Ive argued for years, politicians have no rights trying to dictate anything about search results or content moderation. Coming from politicians there is always an implied threat that if these search results dont come out the way the politicians want, they may take action in the form of legislation.

And, now, a bunch of Republican Attorneys General have sent this ridiculous threat letter to Google with the opposite type of threat, saying that they will take action if Google does limit the search results to these centers. The letter is hilarious in that it whines about politicians seeking to wield Googles immense market power by pressuring the company to discriminate against pro-life crisis pregnancy centers in Google search results when these Republicans are doing the exact same thing just in the other direction.

Unfortunately, severalnational politicians now seek to wield Googles immense market power by pressuring the companyto discriminate against pro-life crisis pregnancy centers in Google search results, in onlineadvertising, and in its other products, such as Google Maps. As the chief legal officers of ourrespective States, we the undersigned Attorneys General are extremely troubled by this gallinglyun-American political pressure. We wish to make this very clear to Google and the other marketparticipants that it dwarfs: If you fail to resist this political pressure, we will act swiftly to protectAmerican consumers from this dangerous axis of corporate and government power.

Note that the letter from Republicans is much more explicit in the threat (and its coming from Attorneys General, so actual law enforcement agents, rather than elected legislature members who have much less power to act on their own).

The letter is chock full of nonsense.

Complying with these demands would constitute a grave assault on the principle of freespeech. Unbiased access to information, while no longer a component of Googles corporatecreed, is still what Americans expect from your company.

Thats bullshit. Its a search engine. The entire point is bias. It is literally ranking the search result to try to bring up the most relevant, and that, inherently, means bias. The attacks on free speech are not from Google trying to serve up more relevant search results, but from politicians of both parties sending these competing threat letters to try to pressure Google into modifying search results to get their own preferred search results shown.

This is what people are talking about when they say that all this politician jawboning and grandstanding is working the refs. As we noted last year, the bipartisan attacks on the internet are really all about trying to control the flow of information in their favor, and leaning on powerful companies to try to get their own side more prominence.

And, of course, Google itself has contributed to this somewhat. For years it took a completely hands-off approach to directly modifying its search results, noting that the algorithm returned what the algorithm returned. Yet almost exactly a decade ago, we noted that, for the first time, Google was caving to outside pressure to modify its search results when it promised the MPAA that it would start demoting websites based on DMCA notices.

We warned that this would open the floodgates of others pressuring Google to make modifications to demote sites they disliked, but now its reaching new and ever more ridiculous levels, with politicians of both major political parties screaming take it down from one side and leave it up from the other, with both sides threatening to take some form of punitive action if theyre not obeyed.

All of this is dangerous. All of this is government interfering with the 1st Amendment rights of sites to display information, content, and expression how they best see fit. Both the Democrats and Republicans need to stop this ridiculousness. Stop demanding how sites operate.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, content moderation, control, crisis pregnancy centers, democrats, jawboning, republicans, search, search rankings, working the refsCompanies: google

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Politicians Whining About Censorship Are All Just Trying To Dictate The Terms Of Debate - Techdirt