A research presentation by Google employees looks at how the company handles free speech and censorship. The presentation, leaked to Breitbart News this week, is titled “The Good Censor,” and is a mix of findings and ideas based on interviews and contributions from a range of journalists, academics, and cultural critics.
The goal, according to the first slide of the presentation, is to “reassure people that Google protects against harmful behavior, while supporting freedom of speech.”.
The slides are a rare and stark glimpse into Google's ongoing struggles, which are being adopted across many Silicon Valley tech platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, and largely limit human conversations.
Essentially, the company is asking whether it is possible to protect itself from the negative aspects of free speech, hate speech, threats, fake news, bots, trolls, propaganda, and election interference, while promoting a platform that gives everyone a voice. Google says in the presentation that the internet was founded on “utopian principles of free speech” and that Silicon Valley was largely built under the guiding principles of these ideals.
Google’s presentation acknowledges that “censorship can give governments – and businesses – the tools to limit the freedom of individuals.” But it also explains all the reasons why tech platforms like Google search and YouTube are responsible for policing what goes on in their apps and pages.
The slides provide a history of how large parts of the internet have been taken over by malicious users and why big tech companies and governments have failed to address these issues.
As for censorship, Google notes in the slides how requests from governments have tripled in the past two years and how YouTube is now the target of the majority of these requests. Google Search comes in second.
The presentation concludes that tech companies are “trying to balance between two incompatible positions” and that this is why censorship is increasing at companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter.
The slides conclude that transparency, consistency, and responsiveness are paramount to addressing this ongoing imbalance, and that there is no “right censorship” that will satisfy everyone and resolve these issues.
The presentation is certainly an honest look at how a company the size of Google analyzes these issues and tries to solve them. But it comes on the eve of the launch of a Google search product and news site in China. We have already mentioned the project codenamed Dragonfly and the internal conflicts, from voices that disagree with government censorship and Google's role.
The slides you will see below do not mention China at all, in their historical approach, online censorship and social authoritarianism.
In response to the leak, Google said the survey is not indicative and does not reflect any of the company's official positions. However, Google said the survey helps to better understand how users think about these key issues.
See the research:
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