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Google bans Podcast Addict app over non-approved Covid-19 content

(reclaimthenet.org)
1525 points garyclarke27 | 3 comments | 18 May 20 07:37 UTC | HN request time: 1.999s | source
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blhack ◴[18 May 20 13:32 UTC] No.23222067[source]▶
At this point: I wish they’d just take a stronger stance and ban everything they don’t like. Just ban the political party they don’t like, ban anything that speaks out against China, just ban it all.

We need to go back to the web, where anybody could install Apache and off they went. Bandwidth is cheap now. BitTorrent exists.

I hope google and twitter and Facebook and all the rest just hurry up with all this.

Some other ridiculous examples of them becoming the ministry of truth:

There was a joke image going around on Facebook saying: “Arizona beaches packed during coronavirus!”. A joke about Arizona not having any beaches because it’s a desert. Facebook censors this and gives you some creepy warning before your allowed to see it.

Or how about: there is a doctor from the university of Minnesota who is running a large scale, international, placebo controlled RCT for a potential covid prophylactic. Twitter is censoring his links to find out more about the study. HE IS A DOCTOR RUNNING A STUDY AT A MAJOR UNI, and twitter is telling him he is misinformation.

It’s all just disgusting and is exactly what a lot of people feared would happen with these companies.

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1. newacct583 ◴[18 May 20 23:47 UTC] No.23229738[source]▶
> At this point: I wish they’d just take a stronger stance and ban everything they don’t like.

Is there even any evidence that this app was banned because they "don't like" it? I mean, come on. This surely got flagged by an automatic system that thought it was a covid app. Google and Apple and social media and basically everywhere are absolutely flooded with apps and content designed to scam people by using fear of the pandemic. The need for a heavy hand to prevent this is real.

The world you want where people are free to talk about covid on every forum is a world where everyone's terrified grandparents are being scammed out of their savings. Scams like that were literally front page news on this very site not 15 hours ago!

Now... if they don't reinstate the app, then there's an argument. But I think the direction of the cuts made by Occam's Razor are really clear in this case: this is a false positive from a scam detector.

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2. pmlnr ◴[19 May 20 06:57 UTC] No.23232058[source]▶
What kind of spam app detector is so bad that it doesn't claculate wirh maturity, popularity, and reviews?
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3. efreak ◴[19 May 20 09:50 UTC] No.23233099[source]▶
The word used was scam, not spam