Google is excelling again - as the whole “uncensored” Big-Tech IT now.
The short summary is that for nearly a year, Google was hiding Proton Mail from search results for queries such as ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’. This was highly suspicious because Proton Mail has long been the world’s largest encrypted email provider.
Meh. I’ve hated Twitter since it was created, so him owning it doesn’t really impact me in any way. Twitter also had its own moderation issues like pretty much any social media company, it just had a liberal bias instead of a conservative one.
I’m absolutely in favor of free speech and I agree with Musk’s criticisms of Twitter, but I also agree with the criticisms of Musk on the same grounds. He’s not better for free speech, and he’s arguably worse.
I don’t think search can ever be free and open, at least not in any real way. There are just far too many motivations to slant it one way or another, whether that’s for profit, political gain, religion, etc. It’s a more meta version of the issue of news media, and the solution isn’t to have government own it, the solution is to make sure there’s competition.
Free speech is guaranteed not through policy, but by ensuring nobody has a monopoly. That’s why I’m here on Lemmy despite not agreeing with the majority here politically (most of you seem to be quite far left), it’s why I use Odysee and Rumble despite not agreeing with the majority there (they’re a lot more conservative than me), etc. We all need to do our part to combat centralization, and I think the government has a place in breaking up centralized services when they get too influential.
If we did that, there’d be political pressure each election to boost certain causes over others. There’s a good reason I don’t use Yandex, I’m worried about ties w/ the Russian government. I don’t think any government should be a gatekeeper to information in any capacity, I think it does a much better job policing other groups’ abuse of their position.