| Context matters. Censorship by a state would include reading mail/e-mail, controlling what is said on social media, controlling what is published in newspapers, what is broadcast on television or radio. That's problematic. And that's clear censorship. What you describe is far more murky territory. If I build a public database which curates newspapers in my local region and I decide to not include a particular outlet, am I engaging in censorship? Not really. As a private actor, it's my prerogative to curate by my own standards. Moreover, one can always go to the library and find that journal in their holdings. The same principle is true at the scale of search engines. These aren't public institutions. These are private enterprises. They are free to curate content in their own particular fashion. And if one doesn't include your website, well, others might and will. The issue here isn't that Google doesn't show the website in the search results. The issue is that Google dominates the search market, and has locked the attention the usage and the vast majority of people using the Web/Internet. That's a different issue which has less to do with censorship, and everything with being able to establish and hold a monopoly in a particular yet massively important market - information dissemination and communications - for almost 2 decades. Ask yourself this: Would you or the author of that tweet have made the same loud objection if a website didn't appear in DuckDuckGo? |