Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vadfa 1657 days ago
Is it legally a good idea for Google to go and blacklist individual sites?
3 comments

They killed off the Wikipedia clones that way. It's funny that they haven't come back even though the SO clones do the exact same thing.
Wikipedia clones probably got enough traffic to show up on someone's dashboard/report. SO clones are probably a small fraction of all traffic, even though they seem to show up in a large percentage of the searches we perform.
I guess Wikipedia kind of got their rampant deletionism under control while Stack Exchange did not?
Child porn is the extreme. www.chillingeffects.org is the other.
Exactly, change the word blacklist to censor, and then it seems wrong.
But that's not censorship. Google is not a government, and no one's speech is being suppressed by filtering out literal copies of something and leaving the original.
Censorship can be conducted by private or public entities.

https://www.aclu.org/other/what-censorship

Change the flag button on this post to censor and I bet people wouldn’t click it. But people want some level of censorship, so long as they convince themselves they’re not against free speech.
Blacklisting by a private entity is not censorship. It's even sillier when you consider that what's being removed are copies and the original content is still there.