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 9 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 6 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.