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

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.

Perhaps a better strategy would be for Google to create an account for the head of government of each country, and give that account the ability to ban any app or video or search result in the respective country. (Such accounts would also have the ability to delegate their powers to other users as required).

Google could write a public blog post saying "We've sacked all our internal moderators and censors, so if you have any complaints about something being unfairly deleted, or not deleted, then vote for a better government next time."

We could then watch the rhetorical gymnastics of some governments saying that of course it would be a terrible infringement of human rights to have a government decide what people can watch and say online, without any sort of due process, not to mention the terrible mental health effects on government workers having to review all the potentially harmful content.