It was. At the time, they felt like they were doing the right thing -- the heroic thing, even -- in keeping dangerous disinformation away from the public view. They weren't shy about their position that censorship in that case was good and necessary. Not the ones who said it on TV, and not the ones who said it to me across the dinner table.

For Google now to pretend Biden twisted their arm is pretty rich. They'd better have a verifiable paper trail to prove that, if they expect anyone with a memory five years long to believe it.

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dotnet00 12 hours ago | parent [-]

To be fair, even if they were being honest about Biden twisting their arm (I don't buy it), the timing makes it impossible to believe their claim.

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CSMastermind 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Why wouldn't you buy it?

The Twitter files showed direct communications from the administration asking them ban specific users like Alex Berenson, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Dr. Andrew Bostom: https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/twitter-files-10th-i...

Meta submitted direct communications from the administration pressuring them to ban people as part of a congressional investigation: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/27/did-bidens-white-ho...

It would be more surprising if they left Google alone.

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dotnet00 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The implication of saying they were "pressed" by the Biden admin (as they claim in the letter) is that Google was unwilling. I don't buy that. They were complicit and are now throwing the Biden admin under the bus because it is politically convenient. Just like how the Twitter files showed that Twitter was complicit in it.

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db48x 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Well of course they’re going to say that they resisted doing the bad thing, even though they still did the bad thing. All it took to get them to do the bad thing was for someone to ask them to do it, but they really resisted as hard as they could, honest.

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braiamp 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Note, that in their letter they carefully avoided mention what happened during Trump 1.0 administration. Their policies started before Biden was president, so this is 100% throwing Biden admin under the bus.

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db48x 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Do you think that they should omit those facts? That they should fail to mention that the Biden administration used them to censor Americans?

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dotnet00 8 hours ago | parent [-]

The language they're using implies the Biden admin pressured them to censor (which, as pointed out, doesn't make sense because they were doing it before Biden too), rather than just admitting that they were complicit with the Biden admin to do it.

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db48x 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Yea, but we can see through their self-serving language. The fact is they decided on a policy of banning “misinformation” that the Biden administration turned into a censorship machine. One is misguided, the other is a crime.

	▲	dotnet00 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The 1st amendment doesn't prevent the government from making suggestions to private companies. They aren't allowed to coerce them into censoring things. So it still isn't a crime. What the Biden admin did was not acceptable, and even at the time I got plenty of heat from HN for thinking that it was a sketchy loophole for the government to use, that it was against the spirit of the law. I'm trying to emphasize the distinction because the companys' self-serving language is going to be abused to claim that the current admin - that has just threatened to sue a TV channel for bringing back a show they tried to threaten the channel into getting rid of - is actually a defender of free speech.

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braiamp 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you read those documents, you will see that the administration was telling them that those accounts were in violation of Twitter TOS. They simply said "hey, this user is violating your TOS, what are you gonna do about it?", and Twitter simply applied their rules.

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db48x 9 hours ago | parent [-]

That was after they had changed the TOS to make it against the rules to talk about certain topics, such as gain of function research at Chinese labs that was funded by researchers that were themselves funded by the US government.

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braiamp 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Which is still a debunked theory. Nobody created SARS-CoV-2 for nefarious purposes. The best theory we have is that there was a failure in the contention. But people pushing for that theory wanted to have a conspiration instead, when plain human failures explain everything.

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db48x 8 hours ago | parent [-]

I never said that it was created for nefarious purposes. That was you projecting or creating a straw man to attack.

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braiamp 8 hours ago | parent [-]

What part of "people pushing for that theory wanted to have a conspiration instead" was missed? I don't care what you think it happened, I just don't want to hear more conspiration. I'm tired of that. We are humans, therefore, we are stupidly imperfect creatures. There isn't anything to learn about the event, other than humans gonna human.

	▲	tbrownaw 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> There isn't anything to learn about the event, other than humans gonna human. US money wasn't supposed to be used to fund that kind of research. So people violated policy and evaded detection until the leak happened. How? Who? Would different audit controls have helped? The was a cover-up after the fact. Again, how did it work and who was involved? What could have made it less effective? The lab accident itself is the least interesting part, it's all the bureaucratic stuff that really matters. For boring generic bureaucratic-effectiveness reasons, not any "someone tried to do a bioweapon" silliness.
	▲	db48x 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Except that a lot of what was banned were _not_ conspiracy theories. The truth is that the NIH _did_ fund gain of function research and that research _was_ conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Those are the facts that the government worked so hard to suppress our knowledge of. And they were able to use Google’s policies of suppressing “misinformation” to do it for several years.