, 9 tweets, 2 min read Read on Twitter
So I've been off the Internet for a while in the wilds of places like Yellowstone. I wanted to get back to this tweet to partially debunk it. Specifically, there's a difference between Google "censoring" and Google "improving results".
Yes, it's true that Google downranks phrases like "Joe Biden touches little girls", whereas DuckDuckGo doesn't. But that's because the phrase comes from hyperpartisan websites known for spreading misinformation.
Google is in the business of providing useful results. That's why it exists. That's what made them in the winner in the search engine wars around the year 2000 over such rivals like AltaVista: they were able to get useful results better.
Downranking sites known to produce misinformation is, of course, part of this. Sites like "Gateway Pundit" and "American Thinker" are known to produce misleading information, so of course, Google should downrank them. It's not "censorship" when serving core business goals.
In the debate over YouTube, Google, and Twitter, we have carefully distinguish which we are talking about: content moderation designed to improve their core business, and content moderation designed to censor.
One comment I saw is that "Google would do the right thing if they weren't so greedy". That's clearly a desire to CENSOR.

In contrast, in my Joe Biden example above, Google is doing so precisely because it is greedy, wanting to improve factual results, not censor politics.
Now my original tweet said "partially debunk", because there's still obvious bias in what Google's employees consider "misinformation". Doing the same search on Google shows a hyperpartisan left-wing site as the top result.
So there are multiple subtle issues. But to address the worst thing, censorship, we really need to understand the differences:
* outright censorship
* bias
* legitimate moderation
My activism is focused against censorship, even when it's by private platforms like Google, Twitter, and Facebook. Despite this, I fully support their legitimate moderation.
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