[bgandrew]

no it's not. they straight up serve kremlin, promoting kremlin fake news and silencing russian opposition (not much to silence but still). they can have whatever functionality they like, I still won't use it in billion years.

[lillecarl]

You know that some people use search engines for other things than news right?

[aeyes]

They sold the news platform, it looks like a step towards having their company less associated with Kremlin content moderation:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/yandex-sells-news-content...

They do business in other countries and for that it is best for the business to appear as neutral as possible. We don't know how much they fiddle with the search results and ranking but this still looks quite neutral to me: https://yandex.com/search/?text=russo+ukrainian+war

[afroboy]

Literally what google doing in favor of USA.

[colordrops]

You're going to get downvoted, but Eric Schmidt worked regularly with the state department, and google employees were involved in spurring the color revolutions.

Julian Assange detailed this in a newsweek article before his name and body were smeared into the ground:

https://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-27...

Oh, but they say he's not trustworthy, or that it's a conspiracy theory that he was intentionally smeared. Well, the CIA and their contractors have been doing it for over a decade, even before he was unfairly accused of helping trump:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/02/the-ridiculous-p...

Google is an arm of the state department, no doubt.

[azinman2]

I think you ran out of tinfoil this one is so large.

[colordrops]

Always the response is to smear with the same thoughtless label when no valid criticism is put forward. There is a link to an actual proposal by a CIA contractor, no tinfoil necessary.

[spaniard89277]

Yeah first thing we hear of US gov using tech companies for spionage and data mining. So much tinfoil yadda yadda

[nosianu]

I doubt that anything like this happend to Google execs in the US:

"Putin's agents reportedly threatened a top Google executive in Moscow with a 24-hour ultimatum – Take down Russia protest vote app or go to prison" -- https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-agents-threatened-goo...

Not yet at least, the political climate may deteriorate to that point, especially when it's about elections, given recent revelations.

Still, at least right now it looks to me - and I have visited Russia and Ukraine several times in the past and still have indirect connections (to people heavily involved in business there) - that there still is considerable more freedom from the government and its wishes for people and companies in the West.

If you publicly criticize a US politician you may get some hate messages, but at least they are from private citizens and you don't have FBI agents knocking on your door threatening you with prison. In Germany some rogue police were found to send threatening messages, but as soon as it was discovered the government acted against it. Also in Germany there even were public rallies from pro-Russian folks, now try that in Moscow with pro-Ukraine banners... Russia even bans the colors yellow and blue, even when they have nothing whatsoever to do with Ukraine and are just decorative: "Russians Strip Yellow and Blue From the Nation’s Streets Over Ukraine War" -- https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/04/27/in-photos-russians...

[waffleiron]

> you don't have FBI agents knocking on your door threatening you with prison.

Correct, it's DHS.

https://twitter.com/_secondthought/status/133274617257067725...

[bpodgursky]

You know people online can just say things, right?

[waffleiron]

I don’t think it’s that far fetched that DHS shows up to someone who is opposed to the US government and is a self identifying communist.

The same DHS who bans immigrants that are or have been members of a communist party [1].

[1] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/policy-ma...

[nosianu]

You can twist it however you like, and select individual sentences and ignore the context and everything else I wrote. At this point (again, may get worse, it does not look good IMO) Russia is at least an order of magnitude worse. You have individual cases - maybe - in the US, but in Russia it's systemic and systematic and goes all the way to murder not just of the person but of the entire family - as we saw in March, when two oligarchs and their entire family were murdered, one in Russia, one in Spain (summary of oligarch deaths: https://www.businessinsider.com/these-are-all-the-russian-ol...). On top of that various murders of "traitors" e.g. in UK and in Germany. Trump got close in rhetoric to what Putin said on Russian TV in March but did not have a chance to implement it, and the US institutions still resist and don't (yet?) follow a dictator blindly, as they do in Russia.

[capdeck]

> Take down Russia protest vote app or go to prison

What about Canadian truckers? Didn't Trudeau call them terrorists, took their trucks, donations, bank accounts and driver licenses... There is no right to protest anywhere, don't kid yourself.

[marshray]

The Canadian truck protesters were allowed to shut down the center of the city, blast their horns 24 hours a day, and shut down a major international trade route. They were permitted to do this for weeks before the citizens got sick of it and demanded action from their government.

They gave protest a bad name.

Your conclusion that "There is no right to protest anywhere" is simply ridiculous.

[ginjas]

>Your conclusion that "There is no right to protest anywhere" is simply ridiculous.

BLM rioters did this, and more. Violence + Property damage + Corporate Backing + gov backing. They didn't had their donation money seized,and almost no resistance to establish order.

[marshray]

Yes, the BLM protests are more examples of the right to protest being alive and well.

[roenxi]

> I doubt that anything like this happend to Google execs in the US:

It seems plausible; we don't know what gets done under the FISA court but it would presumably involve companies like Google. Some suited agent of the US government turning up at Google HQ and threatening jail time under some FISA warrant if some pro-Trump something doesn't disappear off Google.

That'd be a scandal but not the worst abuse of the secret court system. It hasn't exactly covered itself with glory since inception. They already spy on basically everyone and that is a lot worse than some light censorship.

[d23]

I would assume this could go unsaid, but apparently it needs to be said somewhere in this thread: there is zero comparison between the US and an autocratic dictator who attempts to kill and then jails his opposition, runs fraudulent elections, kills journalists, and invades sovereign countries. Zero. None. Zero.

Zero.

Get it?

None.

Zero.

[ginjas]

I mean, if your only criteria is the intensity of the quality, then kinda.

But... :

(persecuted journalist)

>https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-61839256

>https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2013/07/usa-must-not-...

(jails its opposition)

>https://eu.usatoday.com/storytelling/capitol-riot-mob-arrest...

>"hatespeech" (newspeak)

>fraudulent elections: funny how the concerns that 'half' of the US had with elections were dismissed. Especially when conditions were different, by using a method usually agreed (until now, cuz narrative) prone to tampering. So much for free and fair elections.

So _Zero_ huh?

[CRConrad]

> So _Zero_ huh?

Zero comparison.

Sure, there's probably a non-zero amount of germs in the pasteurised homogenised and sterilly-packaged milk I buy at the supermarket. So is drinking that equivalent to sucking the pus out of a punctured boil on the arse of a diseased cow?

No. There's zero comparison. None. Zero.

Learn to read, man. If nothing else, it'll make you a better propaganda troll for your Kremlin master.

[relaunched]

Huge difference. Google does it for money. Yandex does it to enable an autocracy and to maintain their ability to operate.

[honkler]

and how do you know google does not do it to maintain their ability to operate? That's the whole point of deep state, no?

[ushakov]

can you name any Russian company that doesn't?

obeying to Kremlin is just an aspect of running business in Russia

the only option would be not to operate in Russia at all. Yandex can't do this, because their audience is primarily in Russia

[lotusmars]

Well they've made their choice and silenced our protest and opposition, and later spewed pro-war anti-Ukrainian propaganda using country's largest media (Yandex News).

If you're profiteering from our suffering and choose Kremlin's needs over ours, don't be suprised then when we tell you to shove your AI models and your search.

[ushakov]

they're selling Yandex News to VK (Mail.ru)

[lotusmars]

It's still working as usual and they announced the transition after 8 years of warmongering and blacklisting all opposition resources. And only when sanctions hit.

Now they scramble to present a whitewashed image to Western public. They will probably put themselves forward as great contributors to open source.

[joshsyn]

Who's we? I am not in this together. So change it to "I". I don't care about you lot... lmao

[CRConrad]

> Who's we?

From context, pretty obviously "we Ukrainians". Didn't do too well in elementary reading, did you?

> I am not in this together. So change it to "I". I don't care about you lot... lmao

Thank you for so effectively demonstrating what a despicable excuse for a human being you are. I'll do my best to remember this when next I come across anything from you.

[orbital-decay]

Not really, it's very different for Yandex in particular. Along with several other companies like Vimpelcom, they started the "Safe Internet League", an organization which exploited the think of the children argument to build the censorship regime from scratch. They practically created the original censorship laws, or participated in the creation, when they were in the best position to resist the government (and had the incentive to do so). As an example, Telegram successfully resisted the censorship while having much less leverage, much later.

Of course Yandex likes to pose as the victim of censorship, but the truth is that they are the censors themselves. They've been steamrolled by a runaway process they helped to create.

[blackhaz]

Which doesn't excuse them at all. They are full-on supporting the war machine and bloodshed and bear responsibility.

[joshsyn]

What a hyperbolic emotional liar incapable of reasoning...