My favorite (and only) podcasting app. I hope someone who works at Google reads this and flag it internally.
This quote really sums up how ridiculous Google is being:
> What Google is asking of Podcast Addict would be comparable to Google asking a web browser app to remove references to all the websites and social media posts that reference the coronavirus unless the reference comes from an official government entity or public health organization.
> asking a web browser app to remove references to all the websites and social media posts
Except usually a web browser doesn't include a index of sites, You go to a another site (Google/Bing) for that. If a browser does include "recommended sites" the landing pages of those sites best keep to Google's and Apples rules. For an extreme example, If Firefox was promoting PornHub on the new tab page we could understand why Google or Apple would tell them to cut it out, but it doesn't stop you from visiting the site.
I'm not saying I agree with what Google have done here (IMO they should re-instate Podcast Addict), Just that I can see why Google could think "recommended podcasts" and podcast indexes come under the "included content" of an app.
EDIT: As others has said here, It's more like Google banning YouTube because it contains video's about covid 19 which don't come from "approved sources" (Though Google did demonetize people for talking about it and de-rank non "approved sources")
I would disagree in saying it's like Google banning YouTube as YouTube both hosts the actual data as well as filters the data that gets put onto the platform.
Yeah podcast app's rarely host the content themselves (though some do mirror the files to their own CDN's and Spotify have recently started doing exclusive podcasts).
It was more that Podcast app's come with a curated list of podcasts and a search feature backed into the application then the actual hosting of the content.
Podcast apps commonly host indexes for the same reason Google or Bing or another search engine ships with most browsers. Users don’t know, and don’t care, about URLs, especially RSS feed URLs. They (we) just want to type in something and tap on the thing they wanted, instant gratification. Most apps generally don’t spider or find their own content, instead they re-index public indexes, the most common of which is Apple’s Podcasts directory formerly from iTunes. As pointed out, Google also has a directory. It’s a convenience for listeners to more easily find shows.
I say this because I remember the days before Apple’s Podcast directory when it was often easier to Google and listen in your browser or copy it on to a music player via drag and drop than it was to remember to launch an app that would do the downloading for you. (Partly because you still had to remember to connect and/or sync the player, and worry about disk space etc.) Nowadays, subscribing and listening via phone is so easy that I probably download 100x the shows I used to and barely listen to 5%. These days I use the apps as sources of possible content to listen to, but I would be really annoyed if some of the content disappeared with no warning, particularly if it was one daily/weekly episode that covered COVID.
But a search app isn't directly a web browser (Though browsing many be a secondary function). But many adult content search apps have been removed from app stores.
An argument there could be that the user still gets to choose which search engine the omnibar gets sent to.
I don't agree with Googles decision (I strongly disagree with it). Just stating that under the letter of the law (of the app stores policies) I can see why app stores feel they have the power to govern the search results in such apps (iirc web browsers have a exception to the clause - /me goes to double check Googles policy on web browsers - brb)
EDIT: With a quick 5 min glance at the policy it looks like Google have been extremely heavy handed because "Any apps referencing COVID-19, or related terms, in any form in their metadata will only be approved for distribution in the Play Store if they are published, commissioned or authorised by one of these entities." But podcasts in their search couldn't be in their play store meta data. (Still digging)
The bar you set was "Except usually a web browser doesn't include a index of sites". And I see a direct parallel with Google holding a pod cast app responsible for the podcasts content as there is to Google which keeps a more complete index of the content of web sites than the podcast app does of podcast contents.
It's more like Google self-banning Google (or Bing) for displaying non-approved content. Searchengines index external sources and display it to the user, which is the same what a Podcast-app does, isn't it?
YouTube constantly recommends me COVID-19 conspiracy videos since I dared to watch one that was popular here in Germany. Basically on every video I watch I have now german conspiracy videos as recommendations. I did neither like the video or did I subscribe the channel.
If you want to watch something one-off, some interesting tidbit outside of your curated feed then doing it in incognito mode is required, otherwise, as you noted you are doomed.
We shouldn’t have to jump through these kinds of hoops. Their recommendation engine is smart enough to discern between a one off video watch and a genuine interest, but youtube gets stuck on recommending conspiracyland videos. It’s at the point where I just ignore the entire section as if it were ads.
I want a tool to work without having to sift through hundreds and hundreds of videos and try to guess which one caused the drift into crazy town.
I have YouTube history turned off along with other publicly visible tracking and this kind of nonsense still happens to me. Their algo is working on more data than just what they make visible to the user.
Yup. It's just what do these recommendations do to the society? If you are suspectible to believe certain content for whatever reasons you are basically doomed as you get caged into an echo chamber that only validates the bullshit that is fed to you.
Yeah, I've been doing this a lot lately. It's kind of disappointing how easily the recommendations shift once you click on a video that's sketchy.
In my case, I once made the bad decision to watch a Jordan Peterson video. By itself it wasn't crazy, he was mildly provocative, a little paternalistic, not my cup of tea. But geez, the trash that then ended up appearing in the side bar after that was awful. I find that if I watch some "bad" videos, I have to spend a fair amount of time culling shit out of the subsequent recommendations.
Another way to keep your feed from being polluted is simply to create "garbage user" that you toggle to if you want to view potentially garbage content.
What I really wish youtube did was to allow users to filter out videos that contain keywords we choose, like twitter's somewhat effective "muted words" list.
"It's kind of disappointing how easily the recommendations shift once you click on a video that's sketchy."
It isn't just "sketchy" videos. Someone linked me to a video of a dog being rescued, which I watched on my logged-in profile, and it was fine and all, but explaining to YouTube that that doesn't mean I'm interested in hearing about every dog ever rescued (since I didn't know about the 'delete from history' trick) has been a lot of "Never show me videos from this channel" button pushed.
So you effectively desire a way to build your own bubble, and cast it in stone, and also give even more information to Google (what you do not like) ???
My feeling is they pushing the extra crazy ones though.
Watching a clearly not well Person argue crazy theories isn't very convincing to healthy people anyway.
On the other Hand people like Dr. Erickson get censored, because they simply dare to question the lock down and argue that there is no evidence supporting it's effectiveness in saving lives.
It might have been correct to say there's no evidence in March (which is not a reason to not do something, we would still be in the Stone Age if every action we took required evidence.). There's plenty of evidence now as we have data for both going into and coming out of lockdown.
There's plenty of weird, contradictory evidence. Many places have come out of lockdown early, been told they're facing certain doom ("Georgia's Experiment in Human Sacrifice" [1]), and then been quietly forgotten when the predicted consequences don't come. It's hard to believe that lockdowns don't do anything at all, but I don't think anyone can honestly say we have definitive proof they were necessary.
I can. R0~5.7 has dropped below 1.0 in many mask-averse stay-at-home regions, which I consider compelling evidence of efficacy in an adverse environment, under common-sense priors informed by the medical literature.
"This number is below 1.0" is not, by itself, an argument that some particular social policy was necessary or effective. An argument that lockdowns were necessary would at a minimum need to address the questions of "would a less strict policy have sufficed" and "will the long-term outcome after lockdowns end be different".
Georgia has 164 deaths per million residents, versus 82 in South Carolina next door and 87 in California. Are you sure you still want to call that a bad prediction?
> On the other Hand people like Dr. Erickson get censored, because they simply dare to question the lock down
Erickson, among other things, makes provably false statements about the prevalence and mortality of covid19. You’re allowed to be misinformed as a private citizen; you’re not allowed to grandstand in public as a physician and spread misinformation. He’s lucky he only got deplatformed, rather than have his license taken.
You make it sound like he was expressing an unpopular interpretation of the data, rather than actively spreading untrue assertions.
> you’re not allowed to grandstand in public as a physician and spread misinformation
For all I know Erickson is saying no one died of Covid or something that ridiculous/obviously false, but labelling statements as misinformation and censoring them instead of retracting endorsements and getting others to realize those statements are false is an aggressive seize of power by authorities over what is or isn’t true.
I realize authoritative knowledge is necessary; not everyone has the time or ability to parse through medical information and come to reasonable conclusions.
But authoritative bodies should have to earn their authority from the public, not use censorious platforms to assert it. The fundamental problem we’re running into now with misinformation is a lack of trust, not a lack of information. Forcing people to listen to sources they don’t trust and blocking sources they do trust will make the situation worse.
If people trust a crackpot more than they trust an established authoritative body, that authoritative body should take a real hard look at themselves in the mirror and ask themselves why that’s the case.
There are plugins for Firefox to hide all recommendations and the start page of YouTube. Did this a couple of months back, and it has honestly made me happier and with a lot more control over watchtime etc.
I now live in the Subscription section, and it's great!
> > asking a web browser app to remove references to all the websites and social media posts
> Except usually a web browser doesn't include a index of sites, You go to a another site (Google/Bing) for that.</i>
OK then, it is like asking a search/video/advertising company to remove all such references from its search, and hosted videos, and other properties, and banning their apps & services until they do.
I don't see the youtube app being banned for all the C19 rubbish they are currently hosting and indexing. Or the Google news app for the C19 rubish it is indexing and actively pushing to some people (depending on what the relevant sacred algorithm, hallowed be its name, decides who should see).
What they appear to be expecting Podcast Addict to do is exactly what they themselves have said they can't do. Either it is not possible (this is the case IMO) in which case it is not fair to expect it of PcA, or it is possible and Google are hypocrites of the highest order in this matter.
EDIT: after reading the rest of TFA...
Even worse "additionally, Google isn’t applying these same rules to its own podcast app – Google Podcasts" - we don't even need to argue service equivalence to show that as hypocritical.
Of course this is most likely to be an undesirable side effect of some automated system. I'll give Google that benefit of the doubt if they reinstate PcA immediately and apologise for their cock-up.
> I'll give Google that benefit of the doubt if they reinstate PcA immediately and apologise for their cock-up.
Why? It's not as if no one in Google knew that this would happen. I don't think Grace Hopper's 'Better to ask forgiveness than permission' applies here. Google knew what they were doing when they instituted the rule and their behaviour suggests malice aforethought.
> If a browser does include "recommended sites" the landing pages of those sites best keep to Google's and Apples rules.
You mean sites like the BBC? That's where all the COVID-19 related content I have listened to with Podcast Addict came from. Is the BBC supposed to kowtow to Google's self serving rules and propaganda?
> What Google is asking of Podcast Addict would be comparable to Google asking Google to remove all references to the websites and social media posts that reference the coronavirus unless the reference comes from an official government entity or public health organization.
You can try Pocket Casts [1] who are my favorite and only
Of course that's assuming that they don't get the same play store treatment from GOOG
It's a little too ironic that Goggle, who has countless times made the argument that they aren't responsible/liable for what their users do on a service ("honestly senator its just a platform we provide"), and then here they are the ones calling for some downstream accountability. Not that I agree at all with the logic- you may as well say that a bank is responsible(liable) for the use of any money they lend out ;} -- but its the hypocrisy that stinks to high heaven here!
Maybe this is the effect of continuously putting liability on them? You should account the timeline into your thinking, it's not happening at the same time.
it's the effect of trying to avoid regulation by self-regulating. after trump got elected, one of the big media narratives was that it happened because of misinformation ("fake news"); the response has been censorship by platform owners to avoid the charge in the future and any potential federal action
Why do you think so? How do you know it's not the response to multiple attempts to put liability for content on platform owners like Google and Facebook? How do you know they did not respond strongly because most governments have declared state of crisis, which means more severe punishment, and punishment of things that would be OK otherwise (and of course nobody knows what that actually means, let alone all around the world)?
there can be more than one reason, but the censorship began in earnest after trump's election and before covid.[1] this isn't even a controversial position and i'm nowhere near the only person to have remarked upon it.
It didn't start after Trump's election. It started with the "cancel culture" thing a couple of years before that and pressure on companies to participate in the war on crimethink.
I tend to think that it contributed to Trump's election, because it has the effect of creating massive polarization.
You can't segregate sites by viewpoint and thought filter everything in favor of one side or the other and expect it not to devolve into extremist conflict.
But the people doing this didn't want to admit that they caused the problem to begin with, so instead they double down.
The modern polarization of the media began in the 1990s with Newt Gingrich...with help from his patron Rupert Murdoch, an ultra-conservative Australian who owned television stations, tabloids, and newspapers in the US, Australia, and the UK.
Before them, politics was still very cutthroat but not polarized along party lines.
I could say the same about disney, their ownership of certain networks and their ability to influence politica to single handledly redefine trademark laws on behalf of the US government
True - but something happened in the 2010's when Big Tech started taking sides in a way it hadn't before. I cannot picture Google doing this when it was still Google.
> The modern polarization of the media began in the 1990s with Newt Gingrich...with help from his patron Rupert Murdoch, an ultra-conservative Australian who owned television stations, tabloids, and newspapers in the US, Australia, and the UK.
That was certainly a thing that happened, but as far as I know Rupert Murdoch never got Gore Vidal blacklisted by book publishers or whatever.
It's one thing to say your piece, something else to stop the other guy saying theirs.
It seems very similar to McCarthyism and the anti-communist messages from the late '40s and early '50s like the "loyalty review boards", just with wider media available in the modern world. McCarthyism also adopted similar conspiracy theories concerning vaccinations, mental health care, and fluoridation.
There were sweeping purges on Twitter after the elections. The official story was that these were 'bots' or 'trolls', but lots of good accounts got permanently deleted. It happened two or three times as I recall. You'd wake up and see that your follower count had mysteriously plunged overnight indicating another crop of bannings.
Don't worry, Pocket Casts is a much bigger developer. They can generate the necessary online outrage to get relisted. It's the small guys that get shafted.
Because many times the conversation frustratingly becomes a turtles all the way down slugfest between the loud “it’s their platform and they can do what they want” crowd vs. the equally loud “free speech is an absolute” officiated by the “censorship only matters if the government does it” crowd.
Call this an oversimplification of a nuanced issue if you want. Because it is. I’m not shying from it. Just doesn’t seem all that much different from the amount of nuance that goes into and subsequently comes out of the kinds of flame wars commonly immolating this topic anyway.
This is just opinion though, I wouldn’t encourage anyone try to unearth anything objective out of it beyond what pleasantry is warranted for such idle (and wholly inane) thought.
F-Droid only lists FOSS software, but Google sorely needs competition. Unfortunately, any alternative store is unlikely to succeed since the users only have incentive to use it when Google misbehaves, so all Google has to do is misbehave rarely enough to kill the alternatives off.
I'm glad it works for you. I actually tried to switch in an effort to "more FOSS" my life and ended up compiling a concrete list of usability problems that made using Antenna Pod frustrating for me. And that "usability" word has traditionally been the difference in my life between a commercial product and a FOSS one
* Podcast Addict offers auto skip intro seconds, auto skip outro seconds -- and the seconds setting is per podcast
* P.A. offers "stop after episode" if the sleep timer is active, and also allows not marking the episode as played if that "artificial stop" is active
* in Antenna Pod, "delete and remove from queue" does not clear it from the now playing bar
* the "auto download" appears to be opt-in, not opt-out, meaning one must set it for all 85 podcasts
* the bamboo menu doesn't include "delete" for an episode
* and a few more UI nits that bugged me
This isn't a rant, but rather an observation that the Podcast Addict developer wakes up every day thinking about how to make P.A. better, and that doesn't seem to be true for Antenna Pod
I am not a fan of app stores due to these kinds of ecosystem issues, and could never find any good web only podcast players, so I just made my own. It's public but it only really has podcasts I like in the directory.
AntennaPod[1] (my favorite and only) is open source and distributed through F-Droid, so it can't be arbitrily removed by Google. (And if for some reason it were to be removed from F-Froid, you can compile and install it yourself.)
At what point do industries just band together and develop their own app store? Sure third party app stores have far less visibility, but if all the major entertainment groups and content categories could agree on a single app store then it's hard to imagine them failing.
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.
There is indeed a problem here, and FAANG are being hamhanded and overaggressive in their response, but it's hard to find an overt bias that maps neatly onto the dominant (American?) political cleavage.
Much more often (as here), these companies are 1) making decisions in a way that allows them to abstract away and thus ignore the nuances of individual cases 2) putting the burden of implementation on underpaid workers who are not equipped to make these decisions and 3) reacting to any noticeable pushback by moving 200% in the opposite directions.
Locating the problem in Political motivations overlooks the economic incentives that monopolies have to 1) lobby/appease the people in power 2) use political opportunity to squelch competition and 3) treat their workers as disposable commodities.
Yeah, if you relay content at scale, your first preference is to do nothing for moderation. After a little taste of that, people get upset and complain, which is just a little inconvenient at first.
It becomes progressively more inconvenient once some of those people with complaints can subpoena you or fine you millions of dollars or exclude you from large markets.
So your next best option is hamfisted moderation.
Tuning things costs money and time,[0] it's generally easier to just shoot the moon on either false negatives or false positives.
[0] and given conflicting preferences from different powerful groups, is arguably impossible anyway
Or, "I tend to go with philosophers from Voltaire to Mill to Popper who say the only solution is to let everybody have their say and then try to figure it out in the marketplace of ideas. But none of those luminaries had to deal with online comment sections."
EDIT: I should add, Podcast Addict is my go-to. I get how this can happen, but this is all really annoying and I feel for Xavier Guillemane and all the other users. Here's hoping the massive press blitz on this gets a quick reversal in this case, and Google finds a way to prevent it for apps with less visibility. Maybe we can enforce tuning by getting as upset as possible at the false positives.
>but it's hard to find an overt bias that maps neatly onto the dominant (American?) political cleavage.
What about things like google search suggestions being manipulated to hide unfavorable suggestions, but only for certain candidates? I remember seeing this happening real time after trying it one day per a reddit post and then a few days later per another reddit post that such suggestions had stopped showing.
The invention of the tools may have been orchestrated well outside of political leanings, but once invented and handed over for employees to use their application has follow political leanings.
I don't find it hard to believe that Google does things like this, but can you be more specific? What experiment can I run myself to verify that this happens?
> 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.
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.
> We need to go back to the web, where anybody could install Apache and off they went. Bandwidth is cheap now. BitTorrent exists.
the ISPs are a concern. these can turn into an even more dangerous monopoly. can there be a new internet? home antennas? or maybe a way to somehow remove ISPs from the equation. a free flow.
> We need to go back to the web, where anybody could install Apache and off they went. Bandwidth is cheap now. BitTorrent exists.
From your mouth to God's ears friend. I can't tell you enough how maddening it is to observe the way technology has evolved since the time I first encountered the net in 1998. My vision of the future was and remains a server in every home, powerful enough to handle all your digital communication/entertainment needs. Everyone with their website and domain, email etc. What a world that would have been! Well so much for that. All we did was bring back the AOL model in a different skin. The AOL guys must be so mad now, they were just too ahead of their time!
This is the result of out-sourcing juristic work to private companies:
If we treat Android, Window, Twitter, Facebook, as public spaces/goods, then private companies should not have a say in what is allowed/not-allowed on their platforms. This is work for the courts and police to decide and enforce.
If we treat those platforms as private. Then we are playing in s/o's backyard. You are totally at their mercy. They have every right to kick you out if they don't like your face. It's their property. You are a guest.
I think we need constituted digital public spaces and platforms with:
- democratic footing (users are in charge)
- public ownership
- division of power (politicians =!= judges =!= police)
- effective policing
In such a system it would be for independent courts to decide which Apps can be distributed
and which not. Those courts would be bound to a constitution/body of law, which applies to all parties a like.
Yes, this will be expensive. Yes, you will have to give up some privacy.
But you will be a citizen in a society, and not a stranger playing in a backyard.
Maybe the current platforms can be coerced into a system which approximates the above.
But I have my doubts.
I hope in 200years people will have figured this out, and will look back to this age as the digital dark ages.
I agree, that this would have been the better option for them. Now they are stuck with their conent-screening frams, and censoring algorithms. It's a mess.
Still. Even if they did take that turn. I don't think they would have stayed truly neutral.
Lot's of ways to penalize competition without banning them from your platform. A wolf is a bad shepherd.
That's a common myth, and is completely wrong. In fact, it is almost 180 degrees wrong.
Before section 230, there had been a couple of court cases. One held that a particular provider was not liable for anything posted on it, because it did not do any filtering or blocking at all. Another held that a different provider was liable for what users posted, because it did do some filtering and blocking.
Congress felt these outcomes were wrong, and section 230 was specifically meant to make providers not liable for user provided content, regardless of whether or not they did any filtering or blocking.
And yet sites that aggregate illegal content are taken down by the government all the time, despite hosting none of it themselves. If you filter the wrong way, the government will hold you liable.
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
Telcos are private. They are not allowed to disconnect calls when people are talking about things they don't like. They are not allowed to drop accounts for organizations saying things they don't like.
Electric companies are mostly private. They are not allowed to cut off electricity to people/orgs that say things they don't like.
Telephone communications are one to one, not one to many, which makes their regulations largely irrelevant as a model for regulating one to many systems.
You really trust the US court system to be impartial?
Should Apple/Google be forced to carry pornographic apps? White supremacists apps? Apps that invade people’s privacy? Which government should hold this responsibility? Should we have an international committee deciding this?
They are all considered “natural monopolies”. They are also regulated on the municipal level. Do you now want each city to regulate apps? Why stop there? Why not regulate what console makers can sell? every physical store can sell?
In my country >90% of smartphone users have Android. Yes I would call that a monopoly. Yes I think monopolies should be regulated. Not at the city level since that's ridiculous and sounds like a strawman. That comment was just an example of monopolies that need to be regulated.
As Epic found out, not if you want to remain on Google's good side. They were facing sanctions from Google due to their sideloading of Fortnight onto Android phones and tablets.
My understanding is that the "vulnerability" here also exists on every computer or other device on which you download an installer to a public folder--any application can watch that folder and silently replace the file with another when the download completes. There's nothing special about that. Android has a secure internal storage area--but internal storage is often limited. It's gotten better, but my previous phone only had 8gb for both the OS and data to share.
I am not talking the US in particular here. I am saying these decisions should be made by courts not by private institutions, that have stakes in that game.
I am not talking about any particular existing nation state. I am saying that the problems we are experiencing could be solved by having some form of "constituted digital public spaces and platforms". I am well aware of the practical difficulties in establishing these. But it's our inability to create those spaces that is hurting us here.
Please stop. The more we play this tit-for-tat game of political point scoring, the more it causes the whole system to degenerate. It is corrupting every facet of our society, to the point at which we're no longer able to be objective about life and death matters like the current pandemic.
You stop. Stop using $current_panic to justify trampling the parts of the constitution and the parts of the system you don't like. These are legitimate questions that need to be answered or we'll just be in a worse place in the future.
It's so transparent; any time there's some crisis, whether it's terrorism or guns or drugs or a pandemic, there are always people calling for us to ignore the actual issues of our system and ram some "fix" through because this time, no seriously, this time it's life or death and we have to act.
No I’m just amazed that people are willing to give government more power - the same government who would like nothing more than to have more power to intrude on people’s life.
We're advocating moving this power from massive corporations to the government, because at least the government has some accountability, whereas Google has NONE.
Where is this accountability? The Senate by design has two senators regardless of the population of the state, meaning that if you live in a more populous state, you have less voting power than people living in the flyover states. The electoral college also biases the Presidential election to less populous states. Not to mention even in the House of Representatives the ratio between the parties doesn’t match the popular vote because of gerrymandering.
How “accountable” are judges with lifetime appointments?
Google is accountable. If they don’t give people what they want, people don’t give them money directly or indirectly.
In the US, bills (new laws) have to pass both the Senate and the House, and the House is population based. It's a system of checks and balances to ensure that large states and small states don't control each other. In theory, if a particular change is favored by one set and not the other, then it doesn't pass.
In practice it's a little murkier than that, but the way you presented it makes it sound like the system is just stacked to the benefit of the smaller states over the larger, when that is not the case.
Most regulations that are passed are not by law. They are passed by agencies like the FCC, FTC, FDA etc.
So let’s say this mythical law is passed where you give the government more power over private business. The actual execution of the law is going to be carried out by unelected regulatory agencies where your main recourse is unelected judges.
We have a general principle of due process and contract law that can be applied here in insisting that "massive corporations" play nice. Reigning in "massive corporations" doesn't require any new governmental powers.
I'm saying this as someone who leans libertarian but I don't think that is in conflict with the concepts of due process and reasonable contracts. The Devil is always in the details but it isn't an either/or choice.
There is no law that says “play nice”. What laws are they in breach of by only allowing certain products to be sold in their store? Every retailer has the right to decide what is sold in their store. Especially since Android is supposedly “open” and you can sideload.
At various times, HN users want the government to decide what gets sold in Apple and Google’s stores and decide what Amazon can and can’t sell. I’ve even seen that they want the government to intervene when it comes to how the game console makers operate. I guess if it were up to them Nintendo should be forced to sell “Debbie Does Dallas” next to “Animal Crossing” in their online store.
IANAL but I think a major component of contract law involves ensuring that the contract is "reasonable". This is what I meant by "play nice". I realize that the definition of "reasonable" is complicated (thus "law school"). But for the purposes of an HN discussion, I think it suffices.
Maybe you're advocating that, but -- even as someone who is generally skeptical of corporate power and the presumed wonders of the marketplace, and more amenable to reasonable government regulation (as subjective as that clearly is) -- this sounds like a pretty dubious idea.
The government regulation that might be called for in situations like this is regulation that puts a few limits on corporate control of massive platforms, not regulation that just transfers that control to other entities. Make locking down platforms too tightly illegal: relax laws about reverse engineering, mandate side-loading. I don't think we need to take away Google or Apple's rights to say what they will and won't sell in their own digital storefronts, but I don't think those rights should necessarily extend to control over what users install on their own devices. The problem is when those are the only legal storefront (e.g., Apple's iOS App Store), or other storefronts are highly undiscoverable.
So now, in the case of Android, the complaint is that the alternatives don’t know how to market. Should we also break up the record labels and the book publishers because you can’t easily discover independent authors and musicians?
I argue that the government has essentially zero accountability, while the private sector has a huge degree.
Our bandwidth for holding government accountable is so limited as to be useless. Consider the federal gov't, since I think it's what you're mostly talking about anyway. We get to vote for
* 1x Presidential primary every 4 years, from a field of, let's say, 8 to be generous: 3 bits
* 1x President every 4 years, from a field of 4 at best: 2 bits
* 2x Senator primary every 6 years. Let's again say a field of 8: 3 bits
* 2x Senator every 6 years. Let's again say a field of 4: 2 bits
* 1x Representative primary every 2 years. Again, very generous field of 8: 3 bits
* 1x Representative every 2 years, field of 4: 2 bits
That gives us 5.4 bits/year of bandwidth to actually hold our elected officials accountable. Yes, we can write letters and stuff, but that doesn't really allow us to hold them accountable. 5.4 bits in a year is nowhere near enough to express our feelings on the myriad of topics that the government is fiddling with, so we have effectively zero control over those things.
Compare that with private sector. Even for entities like Google, we've got huge latitude to vote with our feet. We can use DuckDuckGo, etc. Our choices as consumers provides a comparatively enormous bandwidth.
>Yes, we can write letters and stuff, but that doesn't really allow us to hold them accountable
Public protests/rallies/marches do bring about change in government/government policies. Many politicians do care about their public image, and are susceptible to manipulation based on public pressure.
>Compare that with private sector. Even for entities like Google, we've got huge latitude to vote with our feet. We can use DuckDuckGo, etc. Our choices as consumers provides a comparatively enormous bandwidth.
Okay, so agreeing with you for the sake of argument - they provide a bandwidth, in theory, but what is the pointif nobody actually uses it? It is "effectively" zero accountability. No mass exodus from Google/Apple/Microsoft/Facebook/Twitter/Whatsapp/TikTok/insert bad company/...
In the political arena, the status quo is that each voter must choose one of:
A) I must vote for the Democrat candidate because the Republicans are evil and they'll subjugate women and minorities.
B) I must vote for the Republicans because the Democrats are evil and they'll turn us into a bunch of commies.
There is no room in today's political debate for even mention of finer points of free speech philosophy, when all we can do is scare people into voting for the lesser evil.
Many politicians do care about their public image, and are susceptible to manipulation based on public pressure.
Well, of course there are nuances to anything, but CEOs are not elected by the public. They don't have "opponent" CEOs trying to milk their scandals in public ads for getting a job. Its different. Anyway, this conversation has totally gone off topic ! We'll just have to agree to disagree on some things, although I suspect we have more points that we agree on than not.
Google is a publicly listed company. Members of the public, either directly or indirectly partially own Google. Google has a duty towards its shareholders. Isn't that some accountability?
I know that not everyone owns Google stock. But I'm guessing hundreds of thousands of people do.
There is the solution of taking away power from the government to fix this. You would need to limit the punishment of people to be the same as corporations. For example, if a corporation commits negligence that kills people and gets fined 2% of its income, then the penalty for negligent homicide becomes a 2% yearly income with no jail time.
The problem is that right now the government will jail an individual and fine them many years worth of income but will not punish a corporation even a 1/100th of the penalty. Equalize that can be done by either granting or removing power from the government.
I don't see how that would work, because fining a corporation indirectly fines every employee they need to lay off and can no longer find a job. Of course, we should fine corporations more, but trying to treat a company like a person is just a stupid metaphor in general and extending that will lead you nowhere sane.
>I don't see how that would work, because fining a corporation indirectly fines every employee they need to lay off and can no longer find a job.
Do we stop putting people in prison if they have a child? Either we have to punish children by depriving them of a parent (potentially putting them into foster care) or we have to allow family status to be a factor in sentencing individuals (institutionalize discrimination on a protected class)?
Currently when we punish someone, little thought is given to secondary victims. I don't see why we would make an exclusion for corporations.
> Should Apple/Google be forced to carry pornographic apps? White supremacists apps? Apps that invade people’s privacy?
My computer allows racist pornography and its the greatest invention in the history of mankind. As far as I can tell, iPhones have not lived up to that legacy.
Yes, but should Apple be forced to sell it? You can buy a DVD player and a TV from Walmart that allows you to view pornographic and racist content but aren’t forced to sell it.
Apple preventing the sale of a product != Apple not selling a product.
I don't ask Apple for permission to visit a website on my iPhone. Why should I ask their permission to install applications? Would it be so awful if I were allowed to run my own software?
But you don’t have to ask Google permission to install software. So why are people asking for intervention in this case?
Choice is amazing. You had a choice to buy into Apple’s “walled garden” or buy an Android. You didn’t need the nanny state to make that choice for you.
You sort of do: before you sideload an app, you have to toggle a switch, agreeing that you are going to do something potentially unsafe. In the similar arrogant manner, they care about your safety purging Podcast Addict app, like parenting you.
The best solution would be an emergence of an Android fork and the corresponding platform, but this seems unlikely due to enormous (as in 100bn perhaps) startup capital required.
There's a common standard for DVDs and a competitive market in them; if one maker won't sell what you want, another will. Apple should be either nationalised or broken up like Ma Bell, and the threat of the same should hang over any market where a handful of players capture enough marketshare to become a de facto cartel.
By that same token, are you paying attention to the actions being taken by Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon?
There are no clean actors here, but the difference between the judicial system and the big companies is that the judicial system has people who care about more than just profits.
It’s even worse. They care about their own ideologies that are often at odds with mine.
The difference is that it is much easier to not be beholden to the private corporations you mentioned than the government. Private corporations don’t have the power of the state to take away my liberty, property or life.
You do realize the context of this conversation, correct? We're not talking about your liberty, property, or life. We're talking about apps on a smartphone or tablet.
> Private corporations don’t have the power [] to take away my liberty, property or life.
No, they can only demand you come in for overtime, require you to move where they want you to, or force you to come in while sick, at the risk of taking away your job. A risk which is minor for some of us, but which is the equivalent of a threat of homelessness for others.
Yes and do you really think morality will never come into play if those decisions are made by the government? What are the chances that this government would go to bat for an app by Black Lives Matter as opposed to Focus on the Family?
> Should Apple/Google be forced to carry pornographic apps? White supremacists apps? Apps that invade people’s privacy? Which government should hold this responsibility? Should we have an international committee deciding this?
We already have a situation in which two companies effectively decide what can go on anyone's cellphone (sideloading is not and will not be a meaningful solution for any more than a fraction of a percent of users).
The only thing that needs to be constitutionally challenged is whether discretionary content filtering constitutes agency in publication under section 230 of the CDA.
Do I understand you correctly that you're talking about whether discretionary content filtering by a platform makes them into a publisher? This would mean that protections that apply to platforms wouldn't apply to them anymore for things like copyright infringement, right?
Section 230 provides immunity to Google and similar for content posted by other users and services. The notion that section 230 requires that Google be neutral in order to maintain that protection is not in the text of the law, and appears to be made up out of whole cloth. I will quote the entirely of section 230 below, see for yourself.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
> the term “information content provider” means any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information
By selectively funding the development of information they favor, YouTube or app stores could be considered in part responsible for the creation of that information, in which case that section would not protect them, because they would then be the information content provider, not merely a provider of an interactive computer service.
That strikes me as a theory that began with a desired outcome first, as the law does not use the language you’re using, nor does it include any of the distinctions you’re trying to draw. There is no “unless if there’s an ad revenue sharing system” exception to 230.
Aside from the details of 230, I would think long and hard about the unintended side effects of what you’re proposing. Attempts to control what Google and similar can and cannot moderate either results in Google having no moderation power at all (a disaster for the entire internet), or gives the government the power to decide what and what is not protected from Google’s moderation (which is contrary to the point of this exercise).
It's just a rephrasing of the theory that Google is acting like a publisher (information content provider) not a platform (interactive computer service), showing that interpretation is consistent with the text of the law. It's also consistent with the intentions of the lawmakers, as stated[1]:
> the Internet and other interactive computer services offer a forum for a true diversity of political discourse
> to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services
The law was not intended to protect a near-monopoly throwing its weight around in the political arena, or a duopoly blocking competition with their own apps.
And if that interpretation did somehow give the government the power to decide what is and what is not protected, that would still be an improvement over the present situation, because the government at least answers to the people and the Constitution, and right now nothing is protected.
> It's just a rephrasing of the theory that Google is acting like a publisher (information content provider) not a platform (interactive computer service),
You are creating a test for platform vs. publisher that is not in the law. The law as linked does not even prohibit the censorship of political opinions, and in fact states that internet service providers may block constitutionally protected speech. It may be intended to free the Internet up for political discourse, but that doesn’t mean we get to totally ignore the text of the law and make up what we think it should be doing.
> The law was not intended to protect a near monopoly throwing its weight around
It wasn’t intended to do that, but that’s what it does. You don’t get to ignore the text of the law because you think it’s not acting the way you want it to. Legal systems work off the text of the laws, not what you think they should be doing.
Also, there are damn good reasons why I advise caution in these areas; unintended consequences are the norm and not the exception here. Section 230 wasn’t designed to protect monopolies, why do you think that trying to make Google “fair” wouldn’t have other unintended consequences?
Besides, if your problem with Google is that they’re a monopoly, why not use anti-monopoly laws? You can target Google specifically with those without the risk of putting all internet speech under the jurisdiction of the courts.
> And if that interpretation did somehow give the government the power to decide what is and what is not protected, that would still be an improvement
It might feel cathartic to use the power of government to force Google to do what you feel is expedient right now, but it’s something we’ll all come to regret. Understand that the nature of democracies is that people you disagree with will one day wield power, giving them the ability to control speech on the Internet is not a wise long term strategy.
> You are creating a test for platform vs. publisher that is not in the law.
There's a clear distinction between "publisher" (information content provider) and "platform" (interactive computer service) in the law. But the law provides no test for which category a particular entity falls into, so we have to provide this. No one is claiming that the proposed test is the current test, just that it's a good test, consistent with both the letter and the spirit of the law.
> That doesn’t mean you get to change what the law does on your own
Of course I don't. But the courts do, and when they do so, they consider the legislature's intent. If an interpretation is consistent with both the wording and intent, even if it isn't the original interpretation, it's possible to convince judges to adopt it.
> It might feel cathartic to use the power of government to force Google to do what you feel is expedient right now, but it’s something you’ll come to regret.
That sounds like fear mongering. If we can trust the US government to do anything, its to respect the first amendment. And if the day comes when we can no longer trust the US government to respect the first amendment, then this discussion is pointless, because at that point we'll have lost all freedoms.
But it's clear now that we cannot trust Google to respect freedom of speech. Of the two, in this narrow case, the government is more trustworthy than Google.
Section 230 provides a very clear definition of what an “Interactive Computer Service” is, and makes it very clear that someone who provides one cannot be considered to be the publisher, full stop.
> The term “interactive computer service” means any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides access to the Internet and such systems operated or services offered by libraries or educational institutions.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
These two combined mean that you cannot find a way to consider Google to be a publisher under section 230. If they meet the definition of an Interactive Computer Service, then they cannot be a publisher under 230.
> But the courts do.
The courts have not weighed in on this aspect of Section 230, but they taken a very expansive view of the level of immunity that it grants. Particularly interesting here would be Blumenthal vs. Drudge, which granted AOL Section 230 immunity even though the content in question was written by AOL’s contractor, which is probably closer to the line than moderation.
Outside the courts, the general legal consensus is that Section 230 does not require impartiality or neutrality at all, based on both the text of the law and the congressional record around when it was passed.
> That sounds like fear mongering. If we can trust the US government to do anything, its to respect the first amendment.
Or, you know, it’s in line with the past few centuries of liberal democratic tradition to limit the power of the government in the area of free speech. The point of the 1st amendment is explicitly to get the government out of the business of deciding what is and is not acceptable speech. You would put it back into that process.
Also, you probably shouldn’t trust the government too openly here. Ever heard the phrase “shout fire in a crowded theater”? It comes from a supreme court case that jailed somebody for protesting WW1 (Schenck v. United States). That bad precedent stood for 50 years. Just saying.
Of course, there are so, so, so many practical problems with just saying “Google cannot block anything that’s protected speech.” Pornography is protected, violent videos are protected, hate speech is protected. Much of the internet becomes completely inoperable if you set the bar at protected speech; surely we’ve all seen enough poorly moderated forums to predict that.
It’s easy to imagine a scenario where Google can block “obscene” speech but not political speech. But where is that line? And who do you trust to have permanent, hegemonic power to decide what is and is not offensive for the entire Internet? Remember that we got into this mess partly because one group of people decided that another group of people’s political opinions were offensive; do not assume that they wouldn’t use the power of the government to suppress each other given the opportunity.
> Section 230 provides a very clear definition of what an “Interactive Computer Service” is, and makes it very clear that someone who provides one cannot be considered to be the publisher, full stop.
Note the word "another" in "another information content provider". The law plainly doesn't protect them for content they are responsible (even only in part) for creating, and by paying for some content and not other content, they're taking an active hand in choosing what content is created. In other words, they are, in part, responsible for the creation of that content.
> where is that line?
That's a question to be answered by democracy, not in a corporate board room.
And private control of the means of communication has never been unrestricted. Surely you're familiar with the regulations that once governed the television networks.
> If Google is paying for some content ... then they’re acting like a publisher.
There is case law to the contrary. AOL was granted 230 immunity when the issue at hand was about what a contractor of theirs said.
> That’s a question to be answered by democracy, not in a corporate board room
Or we could encourage a proliferation of choices on the internet, rather than handing whichever party is in power the right to suppress the speech of the other.
> Or we could encourage a proliferation of choices on the internet, rather than handing whichever party is in power the right to suppress the speech of the other.
I'm talking about preventing Google from exercising that power, not giving that power to the government. No one is proposing to repeal the first amendment.
I'm very much in favor of a proliferation of choices on the internet, but we don't really have that at the moment, and we need regulations that cover the situation we actually find ourselves in, not the ideal situation.
I’ve already made this point at least twice; getting the government involved in preventing Google from moderating content is giving the power to the government. Unless if you want to completely ban the ability of Google to moderate anything, then you are giving the power to someone to decide what is and is not protected from moderation on Google. This power to decide what is and is not immune from moderation would be hugely powerful, and would give the ability of the government to declare which ideological believes are and are not protected from moderation; which in effect would be hugely detrimental to the first amendment.
And even if you strip Google’s immunity from civil damages away, you are handing power over all internet speech over to the courts and anyone with enough time and money to use them. From a citizens perspective there is very little difference between censorship via the first or third branch of the government; both represent the erosion of the first amendment.
Similar regulations have existed in the past (common carrier and the fairness doctrine, for example) without giving the government the power to "declare which ideological believes are and are not protected from moderation".
The fairness doctrine was only constitutional because there were a limited number of channels (Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC), and it was impossible for anyone else to create one due to FCC regulations. I genuinely doubt that it would be constitutional today with cable television, let alone the internet.
I'm not proposing that we reestablish the fairness doctrine, just using it as an example of similar government regulation in the past that didn't have the disastrous effects you predicted.
But since you brought up the limited number of choices, I would like to mention that we find ourselves in that situation again today in the smartphone and online video markets, although for different reasons. And that's relevant because regulation is only necessary when the free market fails to provide the choices and freedoms we expect.
> Section 230 provides immunity to Google and similar for content posted by other users and services.
To be more clear, Google and other web publishers already enjoy immunity for content posted by other users and services. That is the default state of things under American law.
What section 230 does is preserve their immunity even if they exercise editorial discretion over some of the content that other users/services post. Without section 230, they would still have immunity. But they'd lose it as soon as they did any moderation at all of user-provided content.
This is not true. The default state of US law was that those who published without moderation were protected, and those that did moderate were not. Section 230 was created specifically because publishers who moderated user generated comments had been successfully sued for defamation [0].
Section 230 did not preserve any rights at all, it created entirely new ones. Companies were previously able to enjoy common carrier immunities, if they behaved like common carriers. Section 230 granted them those immunities without giving them the obligation to behave like common carriers.
It's hard to argue that the legislature in 1996 were imaging the future we would have in 2020 where the vast majority of content is controlled by such a small collection of companies, and where those companies often operate a lot like a cartel when it comes to moderation of that content. Section 230 is really the only example we have of common carrier immunities being granted to non-common carriers. The reason you don't see that more often is because it creates exactly this set of problems. It's clear that section 230 has had impact far beyond the scope of the 1996 legislation, the world has changed significantly since then, and those problems really should be addressed.
Congress couldn’t possibly imagine that Google would exist when they passed Section 230, because Google probably wouldn’t exist without Section 230. Section 230 is generally credited with helping birth the modern Internet, without Section 230 the Internet would still look like it did in the 1980s; small and non-commercial.
None of the innovation that Google brought to the internet on its' way to becoming an internet giant relied on Section 230. The business of search and adds do not rely on Section 230 protections in any way.
Like any other regulation, it harms small businesses disproportionately to the costs it imposes on large ones. There are plenty of examples of regulations that are appropriate to apply to large businesses, but much less appropriate to apply to small ones. Luckily, this incredibly old problem has been solved many times over through the idea of having regulations apply to companies after they reach a certain size. There is little harm to society in allowing small content distributors full editorial control over their distribution channels. There is significant harm to society in allowing that same level of control to entities which control an enormous majority of modern content distribution.
This trope that "the internet wouldn't exist without Section 230" is just an overused excuse that people peddle out to distract from the fact that regardless of how important it was in 1996, as the internet has changed, this law is now responsible for an entirely new category of very serious problems, that really weren't envisioned at the time it was written. It also ignores the fact that these problems can be easily fixed without removing the elements of it which have been beneficial to the growth of online services.
> This is not true. The default state of US law was that those who published without moderation were protected, and those that did moderate were not. Section 230 was created specifically because publishers who moderated user generated comments had been successfully sued for defamation [0].
> Section 230 did not preserve any rights at all, it created entirely new ones. Companies were previously able to enjoy common carrier immunities, if they behaved like common carriers. Section 230 granted them those immunities without giving them the obligation to behave like common carriers.
It's kind of funny for you to open with "this is not true" and then go on to agree with everything I said. What part did you think wasn't true?
I said that in the world without section 230, you start with immunity from responsibility for content provided by other parties, and you lose that immunity if you moderate those other parties' content.
Whereas, in the world with section 230, you start with immunity from responsibility for content provided by other parties, and you keep that immunity if you moderate those other parties' content.
On the other hand, you've provided the counterpoint that everything I said is absolutely correct, and I should be ashamed of putting out such ridiculous misinformation.
You are trying to disagree as strongly as you possibly can -- despite the fact that you agree with me in full. What's going on?
The whole point of 230 was to answer that: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider".
Some courts had said that filtering makes the provider a publisher and liable for the content. Congress passed 230 to reverse that.
How would that be a constitutional challenge? If you're arguing for a different interpretation of the CDA that seems like a legal challenge and argument.
What's the constitutional argument against the current legislation of the CDA?
The problem is that they have to act across borders.
Examples:
In the EU you don't need to filter pornography the same way as in the US. In the US you don't need to filter personal information (eg individuals' faces) the same way as in the EU.
Or does Google need to ban insults of the Thai king?
Which legislation should apply? Already now China has split the global internet in a China and non-China part...
Is that a problem, or an opportunity? If we create an effective decentralized mechanic to act across jurisdictions, maybe we'd solve more than our immediate problem.
It's both. Sovereignty should not be taken lightly, nor do we really need yet another avenue for the big fish (read: US/China/Russia) to start throwing their weight around - whether it be through ""democracy"", troll farms, agitprop, etc. This may only start to become a better idea once we've proven we have an effective arsenal against these ideas.
This seems very easy: when browsing the AppStore in Thailand, apps that insult the Thai king should be prohibited. Same with Facebook posts when accessed from Thailand, or YouTube videos etc. When accessing the same from the US, they MUST NOT be prohibited, because it would infringe on the rights of the creators.
Every nation should have the right to impose whatever restrictions it sees fit on companies wanting to distribute content to that nation.
Is it a pain to do this for the content distributor? Of course! But national sovereignty is far too important to be traded for ease of content distribution.
Of course, there is a problem (which some may consider a benefit) with the design of the Internet itself: there is no easy way to define what it means to distribute content to a particular country. But probably using national IP blocks is going to generally be good enough for many use cases.
> they MUST NOT be prohibited, because it would infringe on the rights of the creators.
However in reality the company acts conservitively and bans content that violates in Thailand for the US. "it's their platform". That's the same case as in the US. (See the article earlier talking about the CCP protest comments on youtube.)
Yes, that is what is happening because most states are not given enough power to impose their beliefs on entities like Google.
Even more in reality than your example, YouTube is censoring content the US or China or maybe Russia doesn't like everywhere, and it is not censoring content that Thailand or Uzbekistan or wherever else doesn't like even in those countries.
But if the US were to impose a no-censorship policy on YouTube (or at least a no-censorship-except-our-censorship policy), you would probably see some fragmentation to appease both the US and Chinese governments. And if a few dozen other countries did the same, with true force behind their decisions, you would either see YouTube retreating from those countries (perhaps opening the way for local alternatives), or many more YouTube front faces. Either way, there may be some advantages compared to the current system.
There is no fundamental law saying American multinationals need to run the entire world. I'd be comfortable with the idea that a company with as much data as Google shouldn't be allowed to operate a trans-national operation for military reasons. The Chinese acted prudently when they froze Google out of their domestic market.
Centralized walled gardens are going to face this no matter what policy they have. Too loose? They run afoul of laws and offend people. Too strict? They develop a reputation for censorship and offend people. There is no way they can win.
That's why everything has to go decentralized, encrypted, headless, and amorphous. The endpoint should be the end of platforms in favor of protocols and interfaces to those protocols.
> Centralized walled gardens are going to face this no matter what policy they have. Too loose? They run afoul of laws and offend people. Too strict? They develop a reputation for censorship and offend people. There is no way they can win.
Yes, they can win. The problem isn't that you're "too loose" or "too strict". The problem is that you have different users with different views of whether the same things is acceptable. You win by restricting your user base to people who agree on what should and shouldn't be allowed.
This is my knee jerk reaction, but then I ask myself if I really want Trump (or Pelosi depending on your political persuasion) deciding how my search engine and social networks work.
Feeling a big "NOPE" on that one.
Customers need to make it unacceptable for FAANG to act this way... Good luck on that tho.
Unfortunately, they have been very good at slowly raising the temperature so the frog (read:us) doesn't jump out of the pot.
I don't see how putting Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon under the control of the US executive branch would solve the problems of accountability and them needing to deal with the laws of multiple nation states.
If one wants to subject these corporations to regulations, than it seems one should propose regulations. Putting them under the direct purview of a government does not magically make them start working in the best interest of the people (of which nation?). Nor does it mean that they are automatically accountable; see for example the NSA if you want examples predating the current administration.
Why not just free distribution and then enforce takedowns if something is deemed illegal after the fact? There’s no need for “users being in charge” or nationalization. These two parts especially don’t even seem at all necessary to your stated goals in terms of applied regulation. They would also be disastrous.
They have become the new public space over time. I doubt they intended this, but this is the new world in 2020.
If you want to spread an idea now, you won't walk to your local town a square and start talking on a makeshift podium. You'll post a tweet or a facebook post, or make a reddit thread.
While they work as hard as possible to have communication monopolies in their respective spaces.
I agree with you though, the inherent problem is that they are private spaces and should act like it. That means developing the ability to interoperate with other private spaces (some sort of federated protocol would be required), and not having monopolies on distribution (being able to acquire iOS apps from 3rd party channels, for instance).
By extension, if anyone is considering legislation to enforce freedom of expression on social networks, I'd propose a different track—break up the largest of the social networks (namely Facebook at this point) and force them to interoperate.
That seems a lot more practical than forcing private companies to hold up public standards of free speech.
In (US) law there are two sets for rights and responsibilities: public (government) and private (individuals and organizations). But when it comes to responsibilities individuals can suffer consequences that organizations can't. And organizations can have power vastly greater than that of any individual. In some ways they should be subject to restrictions like governments, in others they shouldn't.
Really we need a third group. Corporations aren't individual people, and the legal simplification of modeling corporations as people is problematic. Unfortunately this probably requires a constitutional amendment for the US to change.
>>If we treat those platforms as private. Then we are playing in s/o's backyard. You are totally at their mercy.>>
I don't know what "s/o" means but assuming it means the operator of the platform, no, you are not at their mercy, they are at yours. Just go use another platform. If, in practical terms, there are no other platforms for the thing you want, then that's a different problem.
>If we treat those platforms as private. Then we are playing in s/o's backyard. You are totally at their mercy. They have every right to kick you out if they don't like your face. It's their property. You are a guest.
Maybe this depends on the laws of a country. Also, IMHO either a company offers their services to everyone or to no one. There are, of course, exceptions that aren't really exceptions. Creative work in an "exception". For instance, French painter Monet was so popular that he could choose his customers.
When you have democracy, and you say "users are in charge", what you really mean is "whatever group of users can get a majority is in charge".
What it perhaps sounds like you're saying, which isn't true under democracy but is desirable, is "individual users are in charge", i.e. you are in charge of your own data and content.
Putting users in charge does not solve censorship problems. The majority opinion - if it is in favour of censorship - will censor competing opinions.
Public ownership does not solve censorship. See: the CCP.
Effective policing does not solve censorship. The police will be tools of whoever and whatever is funding them.
The only way to combat censorship is through decentralised and distributed platforms that are made publicly immune to takedowns, censorship, and prosecution.
It astounds me that people are happy to accept that free speech in the US only applies in public spaces, while handing over control of the best places for spreading information to private companies. What's the point in that? "Free speech only applies to public space! Private companies can censor who they want! proceeds to make sure the information superhighway is entirely owned and controlled by private companies".
But public control doesn't work either. We've already seen government around the world censoring information in the "public interest".
Decentralisation, and distributism are the only ways.
It is a bit of both. Sure, 'public' becomes a bit tenious
(Perhaps 'government' is a better descriptor?), but still applies. Other truly communist nations have had similar issues with despotism however. And as is parroted so often, a government is where the state has a monopoly on violence. The trick is to limit the rights and abilities of the state to do so without just cause while allowing minority opinions to flurish.
A platform isn't public or private. It's a platform. You can use it any way you want. But if it's not your platform, you don't get to make the rules of how it can be used or how it works.
I don't think people realize how ridiculous they sound when they reach this far just to get Google to do whatever the user wants with Google's service. It's a very millennial/zoomer/i-only-know-life-since-Google-has-existed point of view. It implies that people don't think they can fairly live a human existence without using Google (which is the truly disturbing thing about all this).
I mean, jesus. Nobody has forced you to use any of Google's services, you literally do not need to use any of their services at all. And there are alternate service providers. We didn't even go this far with Ma Bell, an actual monopoly.
If this is about "boo hoo I can't make money off of their platform", why not the same complaint about literally any other business? It's a much more reasonable thing to fight for, say, right to repair, than right-to-make-an-app-that-will-be-published-no-matter-what-by-Google.
At the moment, the best comparison I can come up with is food trucks. Say you own a giant empty lot. You offer it to food trucks to come and sell their food in your lot. It's a big success. You make money, the food trucks make money. Then one day, you want to kick out a food truck, for whatever reason. And they say, this is so unfair. We should form a government committee to manage this parking lot because the owner of the lot won't let me sell hotdogs here anymore. Even though they could just, you know, do what they do somewhere else, and still make basically the same living.
The solution to this as I see this is that these platforms allow everything. Only block illegal (local law) content and spam. Provide users with powerful blocking/filtering tools. The only influence they can have on content is monetization/advertising. They are free to be preferential with who they wish to monetize. Thats the best compromise I can think off.
I use Podcast Addict every day, I would even say that is my most used app on android. I work listening to podcasts and PA is the best app for those who like highly customizable software. You can change almost everything.
Its sad that we are in a situation where a company can dictate what we can install on our computers/smartphones. I know we can sideload apps on android, but the majority of users doesn't care about this and just give away its freedom to really own the device in exchange for the easiest way to operate it. And every day we walk towards lesser control of our property and more dependency of those companies.
Another problem is that developers can, without notice, be locked out of their incomes for whatever reason without ways to properly appeal. Those who can, we should consider supporting the developer Xavier Guillemane on Patreon, at least until this situation gets resolved. The amount of work he put on the app, its probably his main source of income and I wouldn't like if he need to abandon the app development due to this. The lowest tier is just $1.
> dictate what we can install on our computers/smartphones
Can they though? Android does not make it difficult at all to install apps through stores other than their own Play Store. A quick internet search reveals that there are at least a dozen other options for users to download apps to Android phones.
I agree that a devices OS should allow alternative means to install apps, but Android has clearly done this.
I agree with you on that, Android is far less hostile to installing software outside of the store than iOS.
The problem is, if the developer wants its software to reach the wide audience of the platform, its a obvious choice for him to use what the users perceive as the "official way" of installing software. Sure, you can offer both ways, but if your app is missing from the official store, the majority of users won't even know it exists.
IMHO we, as users and developers, have our share of the blame for problems like this one, and we should be vigilant so Android doesn't become like iOS.
The other side of this is that app developers are screwed when it comes to compensation. Providing the ability to sideload doesn't mean anything if developers can't be compensated and can't continue developing their app (as I don't expect them to if they aren't in any way rewarded for it financially).
In most of these stories featuring Google abusing their power to remove apps, it's usually a matter of some automated tool gone wrong and the problem is solved a couple of days later. But this time it's different, they are actually asking developers to censor themselves if they are not affiliated with a gov.
It may be automated based on frequency of reports, but either way this is unlikely to be company policy. The people who make these decisions are relatively low-level employees following a company guidebook. The guidebook says it has to go? It has to go. The employee doesn't want to get fired.
>...but either way this is unlikely to be company policy
Perhaps you haven't seen the article because it's behind an Apple News link. There's a screenshot of a message stating company policy as follows:
"Pursuant to Section 8.3 of the Developer Agreement and the Enforcement policy, apps referencing Covid-19, or related terms, in any form will only be approved for distribution on Google Play if they are published, commissioned or authorized by official government entities or public health organizations"
That's not what I meant. I mean, it's unlikely that someone high up in the company decided to snipe this app. It's probably a low-level employee following the formal rulebook a little too much to the letter.
We’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. With new diseases or any new phenomena knowledge changes frequently. Oftentimes official organs are lagging and independent voices are at the forefront and have the freshest information.
Unfortunately both of the above can have counter agenda (could have good intentions such as calming hoarding), even worse is that you can have kooks, active disinformation, lulz, etc. There is no good answer to this.
I think our traditional answer was good enough. Trust the people to weigh a wide range of information and opinions. Delegate more detailed analysis and decision making to political representatives and independent institutions.
It's not like there wasn't any anti-scientific rubbish, hate speech and manipulation in book shops, newspapers and on TV. Entire countries used to be run by media barons (literally or effectively).
Regarding Covid specifically, I find it pretty ironic that free speech should be restricted to government officials by an oligopoly of US corporations while the head of the US government routinely spreads anti-scientific disinformation on that very subject (and on others).
I agree. Not only the US but even the WHO is very susceptible to manipulation (it’s not human transmissible, then yes it is, masks don’t work, then yes they do). We also see politics dictate policy (viz Taiwan). Then Gates alarms almost everyone with his “disease free certificates”.
> >...but either way this is unlikely to be company policy
> Perhaps you haven't seen the article because it's behind an Apple News link. There's a screenshot of a message stating company policy as follows:
> "Pursuant to Section 8.3 of the Developer Agreement and the Enforcement policy, apps referencing Covid-19, or related terms, in any form will only be approved for distribution on Google Play if they are published, commissioned or authorized by official government entities or public health organizations"
How does their own browser not run afoul of this policy?
Because policies are written and interpreted by humans that have the common sense to understand that there is no connection between the browser app and the content it displays.
This entire thread is a discussion about Google's automatic tool flagging a podcast browser erroneously. If Google's response was to uphold the suspension then there would be an actual story, but they won't, and so it isn't.
Podcast Addict builds an index of podcasts that it makes available to users whereas Chrome does not influence in any way what content users may want to view.
But your question is of course very apt when it comes to the Google Search app or Google's own podcast app.
There used to be this idea (a good idea in my view) that building a search index is a neutral activity that does not come with any editorial responsibility for the content.
Google used to fight for that idea but unfortunately lawmakers (and I think the majority of the population) have very firmly taken the opposite view.
I think that's what's ultimately at the core of this defensive "when in doubt, ban it!" attitude that was built into automatic content filtering tools and hammered into the heads of reviewers.
There are still gaps - the most glaring one being Google Search - but I think Google has largely given up that struggle in favour of avoiding billions in fines
There have been too many cases of a popular app being bought by scammers and repurposed. They can't exempt an app from being suspended just because it's popular.
I would rather apps be automatically suspended and the install marked as potentially dangerous than have my device goatse'd to a malicious developer for any amount of time.
That can be accommodated. Automatic suspension that lasts 20-30 minutes while someone on the team looks into the case and makes a human judgement.
But a full suspension, on a popular app, without rapid human review? That shouldn't happen.
Also, this wasn't up to the "install marked as dangerous" level. They just prevented new installs. In a situation like that, there's no need to act instantly.
That kind "popularity content" policy will never work because because then scammers will just buy apps with good reputation. This describes the entire browser extension marketplace. Any extension with a good reputation and a broad permission set will sell for a good bit of money.
This isn't as weird as it seems in this new weird world. The "most official" support channel for Spotify is their Twitter handle while their email form is the secondary option.
Letting internet outrage drive the support queue is oddly pragmatic.
But automating something that might eat a kid, versus inadvertently blocking an app access very very different. This why no one is tackling a nanny bot --- repercussions.
This "Not approved by Government or Public Health Organizations" rule seems to apply to all the indie apps except for the apps built by mega corps
- Twitter app asks users to follow Covid-19 related news as the first item in their home screen after login (and has a separate tab for news related to Covid-19 in Search screen).
- Reddit official app asks users to subscribe to /r/Coronavirus (that subreddit is not moderated by any government).
- Quora android app has a banner at the top that is similar (follow Coronavirus Space - all the content in that topic seems to be generated by users).
- YouTube app currently has a featured video related to Covid on my feed from one of their official Spotlight channels.
I'm sure Facebook has something similar to follow news related to Covid.
So there's no consistency of banning non-official speech on Covid-19
Also this is not the first time it happened. Same thing happened to
And in all of these examples, app seems to be restored after talking to someone at Google. Shouldn't that be the first thing done by the Google play team (before suspending the app) instead of dev losing all the installs and revenue for the time the app is suspended?
None of the app stores are fair. Apple charges amazon 2x less for any subscriptions done through the app store. They all reject many indie apps for protecting privacy or security but then all the big apps are allowed to do it. Their apps can access system APIs that are off limit to others.
Some people in the comment section only recently feeling the censorship done by china affecting them but imagine other non-US countries that get censored by American companies all the time.
Isn't it even worse? Does the app hosts the podcast or merely references them / plays them? More like banning a browser from the store as the browser may be used to display inapropriate content.
I see your intent is an analogy but that’s exactly what they did in Jan-Mar timeframe. They suspended people for acknowledging the virus’ existence. Just CCP style.
These haven't been cherry picked, they're the top 4 results on a DDG search.
Your example only demonstrates that you don't understand the difficulty in censoring content on social platforms as enormous as YouTube; not that Google don't have a policy that prohibits such content.
The one I linked is from a Swedish conspiracy theory channel with 16k subscribers and it has been up for 2 months, gotten 40k views (huge for Swedish language content) and does not try to hide itself at all ("WakeUpGlobe SE" and uses "corona" in the title). It would be trivial for a human to find this.
You can't blanket ban terms otherwise you'd end up accidentally banning far more false positives than a few podcast apps. For example "corona" is a pretty broad term -- it would be like banning Nazi content but using the word "German" from "National Socialist German Workers' Party" as your identifier then wondering why half the German language videos disappear.
> It would be trivial for a human to find this.
Someone literate in Swedish maybe (to gather the context of those key words) but it isn't humans which do this.
Google are big into automation to the extent that they have machines doing their review. You might consider that wrong but then you have to ask yourself how many humans would it take to moderate a platform as large as YouTube. I bet you that whatever number you come up wouldn't be enough and someone else would say "I found another video that was trivial to find, Google don't hire enough platform moderators!"
Plus it's a pretty horrible job being a professional moderator and spending your whole day reviewing the dregs of society. I've read reports where people who've done it had said it's had a very real negative impact on their mental health.
As I said earlier, fixing problems like this at scale is insanely hard. It's one of those things that might seem easy at a superficial level but it's fraught with errors and you can guarantee that whatever decision the moderator makes (be that human or algorithm) someone will be unhappy and claim it's not fair.
Again, I didn’t say I agree with the apps removal, just that Google we’re at least being internally consistent.
With regards to the app removal, do we know it is a Google management decision and not the work of an overzealous app reviewer or an algorithm (the latter being the way Google usually operate)?
The reason I talk about internal consistency is because it is hard getting the right balance between removing stuff that should be vs stuff that shouldn’t and that problem is only magnified when when doing so at scale. So if this were a management then I totally understand the pitchforks but if it’s a false positive an in algorithm then hopefully Google will rectify and we can all go back to moaning about Electron or whatever the next meme is.
I disagree that they are being consistent. An almost-equivalent move would be suspending the entire YouTube app, and making a new entry in the Play Store after they have removed all offending content. But at least YouTube has some ability to remove content, so that would actually make more sense than suspending Podcast Addict which plays third-party-hosted media.
They’re suspending accounts on YouTube and pulling videos, just like they’re doing with apps on their Play Store. They can’t moderate the podcasts posted but they can moderate the apps and videos posted. So of course it’s internally consistent.
The real question is whether it should be consistently upheld without exceptions and the answer to that is obviously “no” because some apps are hubs to user curated content like that podcast app is.
As for your comment about them suspending their entire YouTube app, you talk as if this was a management exec decision rather than rouge judgement that will inevitably get overturned.
Google isn’t a single entity. It’s a collection of people and algorithms all making their own judgements based on Google’s policies. Sometimes they miss stuff they should moderate and sometimes they get overzealous and remove content they shouldn’t. There is such a large grey area and scope for personal judgement that you have to expect some unpopular verdicts from time to time. It’s shit but no two situations are identical so it’s a problem that’s impossible to avoid. The real tell is whether Google reverse the decision once the complaint gets escalated.
It's a great pity all the factual comments about YouTube's COVID-19 video removal policy (or "censorship" depending on your viewpoint) are being down voted while all the anti-Google rhetoric is floating above it.
I get it's cool to hate Google these days and I'm not saying I agree with the removal of the podcast app, however the removal of that app is consistent with how Google have been maintaining some of their other platforms too. This isn't a theoretical point either, it's been well documented in the news and talked to death on here too. So regardless of my opinion of Google (and to be clear: I'm not fan either) I still can't help feeling that all the "Google are hypocrites" remarks being made are completely ignorant of the fact that Google are actually removing content on YouTube as well.
It's a great pity that you treat legitimate disagreement as mindless anger.
"They are removing content on youtube." is a true factual statement.
"They are applying the same standard." is not.
The motivation may be the same, but the types of removal are very different. As long as their own podcasting app is up in its current form, there is a very good argument that they're not being consistent.
> It's a great pity that you treat legitimate disagreement as mindless anger.
I’m not talking about disagreement of these posts (there’s nothing to disagree, the comments were factually accurate), I’m talking about the comments where people say stuff like “Google's rules only apply to their competitors“, which clearly isn’t true (as I’ve proven).
I also don’t agree with you exaggerating my comments to claim I was accusing people of being mindless and agree when I said no such thing.
> The motivation may be the same, but the types of removal are very different. As long as their own podcasting app is up in its current form, there is a very good argument that they're not being consistent.
When splitting hairs there’s a risk you sub-divide the problem so finely that you then can argue nothing is equivalent and I think that’s what’s happening here.
There’s a saying that goes something like “don’t attributed malice to acts of incompetence” which applies here. People are quick to jump on the offensive when it’s clearly a policy that Google follow on their other platforms and it might well be a decision that is overturned upon review.
I don't think it's splitting hairs. Banning video channels and banning apps are very different things. Consistency would ban both apps and any normal web browser, or would have never gone near banning this one.
The equivalent to the youtube bans is when they ban apps that are actually about covid-19. Not apps with internet search.
> I’m not talking about disagreement of these posts (there’s nothing to disagree, the comments were factually accurate), I’m talking about the comments where people say stuff like “Google's rules only apply to their competitors“, which clearly isn’t true (as I’ve proven).
No, the exact opposite of that. Because I was replying to the part of your post that says "It's a great pity all the factual comments about YouTube's COVID-19 video removal policy (or "censorship" depending on your viewpoint) are being down voted"
That is about disagreement, and is not about comments where people say stuff like “Google's rules only apply to their competitors“.
> I also don’t agree with you exaggerating my comments to claim I was accusing people of being mindless and agree when I said no such thing.
You said "factual comments are being down voted" in favor of "anti-Google rhetoric". That's either people being mindless or people being malicious. Maybe I shouldn't have used the word "anger", but I don't think "mindless" is exaggerating what you said at all. You painted the situation as having no legitimate reason to downvote those comments.
I don’t think there is a legitimate reason and I’ve cited how those comments were factually accurate. You might disagree with the comparison but I don’t think we are likely to see eye to on that, which is fine. :)
However I still object to you twisting my words to something far more sinister then they’re clearly intended. That’s simply not good debating.
There were comments with facts, but whether they supported the point being made was arguable. If the facts are irrelevant, it's not a great pity to see a downvote.
And yeah, that disagreement is fine.
But you need to understand that I am not trying to twist your words at all. I see those two things as synonyms. No twisting is intended. And for you to say "far more sinister then they’re clearly intended" sounds like an accusation of deliberate malicious behavior, not even me making a mistake, and I don't appreciate that.
“Disagree” and “hate” are not synonyms. They’re related terms but they don’t mean the same thing and are intended to express different extremes of sentiment.
“Deliberate” and “malicious” is another example of related but terms that are not synonyms.
Whereas “mindless” was entirely fabricated by you.
You can’t just swap out words for more emotive terms and assume that was the writers original intent. Especially when you then go on to use those new, more highly charged words, as part of your complaint against the original comment.
My post was only talking about disagreement as expressed by downvoting. I was not using disagreement as a synonym for hate.
> “Deliberate” and “malicious” is another example of related but terms that are not synonyms.
I wasn't saying they were. I feel like you're greatly misunderstanding my posts or something.
> Whereas “mindless” was entirely fabricated by you.
So what motivation were you implying, when you talked about it being a "great pity that all the factual comments" about the policy were being downvoted?
I wasn't swapping out your own words for other words. You never explicitly said what the motivation was, so I did my best to convert that into words. You're telling me I did that wrong, fine, but it wasn't on purpose. You tell me what words I should use there, to talk about the motivation of those downvoters.
"They're also fighting conspiracy theories on YouTube"
It's too bad google is so insanely incompetent that there are more every day instead of less. It's enough to make you think that they aren't staggeringly incompetent, have talented engineers, and aren't trying to fight conspiracy theory videos that are among the stickiest content on their sites.
It's an insanely hard problem to solve at the scale YouTube operate on. Your comment is equivalent to those armchair critics that moan about national sports teams as if they are their kids Sunday league.
I just downloaded google podcast app. Did a search for corona, there are a bunch of results. Google is not a government entity, neither are all the podcasts I could find using it. I hope they will ban their own podcast app pretty soon.
This is my first comment in HN. This is the best productive podcast app ever. The developer is also so helpful with any kind of bugs I reported. I hope this is resolved quickly.
I'm still using BeyondPod. Development is stale and problems start appearing. It has one-two features really unique that I miss with other apps. First and foremost "Smart Playlists"
Podcast Addict shouldn't be banned for non-approved Covid content.
When I tested the version of Podcast Addict with ads, it started reloading ads in the background and going through my battery and data allowance. The developer wasn't able to figure out and fix the problem. Just did a quick search and the last time someone wrote about this problem is a year ago (on reddit). Maybe it is fixed now?
I would be okay with an app being banned for such bug, btw. It's app bugs like this that cause the ever stricter background service restrictions on Android (until it's like iOS and just not possible anymore).
It's hard to take an action. Google cares about recall right now to avoid liability. In theory it could be easily solved by lowering the threshold which will certainly improve precision. But you know what that will also do? It will lower recall which will just open Google up to litigation or regulation. See what regulation did to YouTube. It's the same reason YouTube has such a weird copyright strike process. Google is not secretly conspiring against YouTube creators like the creators would like you to believe.
I think a socially good deed would be to take the original tweet https://twitter.com/PodcastAddict/status/1261671685477941253... and respond to it tweeting @FTC , @kenpaxtontx (who is behind the antimonopoly case). Google will reinstate the app soon, but it should help building the antimonopoly case against this evil machine.
Somewhat on topic: a reply to that tweet simply had the captain kirk facepalm gif, and twitter warned me that it may contain sensitive content. Social media is creating a milquetoast society.
I've never lived in China but this immediately sounds like my (naive) idea of what it must be like: you're only allowed to consume what the government has approved.
How is it unconstitutional? Google/Youtube is not a neutral carrier and can pick what gets broadcasted - just like Fox or CNN.
For the record: as a paying Podcast Addict user, I think this is a shitty action by Google. I just don't see how it is unconstitutional.
NB. I hope something good comes out of this, like more people discovering and using third party app stores, or being able to run apps on android auto even if google hasn't approved such apps (hello TomTom).
The govt asking Google to help keep the spread of misinformation down is totally different than the govt forcing Google to do so and arresting anyone that posts anything contrary to the official position.
> private corporations taking some kind of political stance.
It's not a political stance, it's a moderation action.
Google, Facebook, etc. are just bad moderators of their platforms.
Selective enforcement of moderations policies is bad moderation.
Implementing automated moderation without proper quality control is bad moderation.
Implementing automated moderation without proper appeal processes is bad moderation.
The moderation policy is insane, but I think how moderation is done is even more insane.
What is a government but a "corporation" that owns land and takes a political stance? I find Google to be virtually indistinguishable from government besides that it doesn't have a constitution. Even worse is that they have contracts with the US and various governments, making them a political toady.
Except this time it's a company. I've always wondered why people in the 70s were worried about 'technocracy' and I dismissed it as a bit of a conspiracy thing. I'm not so sure now.
I've been getting away from apps installed from the play store over the years. This is one of the 2 remaining apps I have that I paid for. This is appalling behavior my Google. I can't wait until I can make a real Linux based phone my daily driver.
What do you mean? Pinephone is alive and well and you can get your own Linux "toy" for $150. Can't say much about Librem 5, but afaik they are also shipping.
Sailfish is pretty great and I wish them all the best, I did find myself in need of a few features while using it, one thing being their web browsers lack of usb access for devices like yubikeys: https://together.jolla.com/question/213458/usb-2fa-support-i...
I'm just guessing but one reason could be to avoid having to support foreign payment, tax and possibly warranty regimes (Jolla, the company behind Sailfish OS, is based in Finland).
Also they might want to avoid doing business in countries that support software patents and are over litigious over that (eq. USA).
But this limitation is pretty much artificial - the only thing you need to do from the EU is buying the image. This can be achieved via an EU based VPN (reportedly the built in VPN in Opera works) and AFAIK any mainstream payment card will work (does not have to be from an EU country).
Once you got the license and installation image, there are no real EU specific limitations. I have used Sailfish OS twice while on a trip in Japan and all worked just fine - repo access, etc. Also from the download statistics from OpenRepos (a community package repository for Sailfish OS), you can see there is a lot of users from countries that are not officially supported:
No idea, haven't touched WhatsApp and don't intend to. :)
That said, the SW will of course lag behind commercial offerings. Just see how long it took for desktop Linux to catch up to the major players. But open source system gives me the freedom to turn it inside-out, get rid of things I don't want (even systemd if I felt really strongly about it), repair what I want - be the owner of by phone and not just a cow to be milked for rent. Nah, I can live without WhatsApp. Or I can get a secondary cheap Android phone for such apps.
Devices are cheap. If you can't live without certain proprietary apps, carry two phones. If you don't want to do tethering for battery reasons, a second cell plan is under $10/mo.
I'm using a Pinephone for a few months now. Not as my main Phone. The hardware is not great(150$) but the software is getting better each week. It's so much fun to play around with. And I'm going to buy the next hardware generation without thinking twice.
> I can't wait until I can make a real Linux based phone my daily driver.
They will be too busy arguing about systemd or similar rather than working on the UX so it will never happen. The Linux world seems to strive for perfection (despite everyone's idea of perfection being different) when they barely have the resources to do even a "good enough" solution.
One of the few paid apps I use extensively. Completely ridiculous given that their own damn podcast app shows everyone the same podcasts.
Not to mention that you can literally post an RSS feed into pretty much every podcast app, it's an open ecosystem. Jesus.
Can Google actually put people with some degree of sensibliity in charge of these decisions? This reminds me of Amazon deleting 1984 from people's Kindles.
Someone on HN suggested an amendment to the rule that private companies are not obliged to follow any freedom of speech principles when they grow to a size where they are closer to a carrier than a service. I think it's time to seriously consider something like that.
Sweden and herd immunity is official government source? Also this is the only country where scientists are in 100% control, politicians don't make these shots what so ever, this is their policy for this pandemic. So all these anti lockdown folks can always have that as an official government source and possibly also scientific because of the way they set it up there. Of course at least in Europe all the countries are moving the same direction anyway.
Or "public health organizations". Given how much the WHO lied to everyone to protect PRC, continues to do it and bullied the country that handle the crisis the best (Taiwan) this is particularly ridiculous, in addition to being indeed distopic. Or maybe Google want us to drink bleach, as this a solution approved by POTUS? Not wearing masks like the French government said? If anything governmental sources should be as heavily fact checked as any others.
Imagine allowing someone to relay information that causes the decimation of the human population. Just wanted to give an idea of what the other side of the argument looks like.
To some extent they already are. Whether it’s the EUs “Right to be Forgotten” or US DMCA takedown notices, Google are responsible for removing listings.
To be clear: I also don’t agree with the podcast takedown.
I'm sure Google will suspend their own podcast app too?
> Searching for “coronavirus”or “COVID-19” in Google Podcasts returns podcasts from mainstream media outlets that aren’t endorsed by government entities or public health organizations.
I've seen so many of these posts saying, Google removes this or that from the store. But until now I did not realize how criminal this is. I know the Dev. Super guy, addresses help questions from thousands of users personally all without the jaded condescending that many maintainers effuse.
Podcast Addict is my favorite podcast app. I have been using it with great satisfaction for years. I hope that gets sorted out quickly.
Another aspect that I don't quite understand: The story claims that Google asks for the app to be published as a new download. And indeed the provided screenshot includes this request (in pretty small print). This makes no sense to me. Why wouldn't Google be satisfied by just changing the existing app? Any ideas what the reason might be?
If you are an end user who would like to avoid getting caught in this situation, you might want to switch to using F-Droid [0] as your primary source of Android software. The selection is more limited, but because everything is open source and distributed outside of Google's walled garden, you can be sure that it won't be arbitrarily removed because of the whims of corporate bureaucracy.
I write this not as a dogmatic free software proponent, either; I have bought apps on the Play Store in the past and would consider doing so if the experience weren't so poor. Dealing with the Play Store has gotten so frustrating (not just due to this issue, but also due to the difficulty of filtering out shovelware and spyware) that I only reach for it as a last resort now.
How does f-droid police "shovelware and spyware"? Or just outright malware? Surely they will remove it? In which case your favourite app might be "arbitrarily removed"?
They try to scan for them, and have reporting options. Its open source apps only, so first, if its removed, then arguments can be made using the full source code as evidence one way or another. And you can always grab the code for your favorite app and build it yourself.
Open source doesn't change anything here. Bytecode has a extremely tight relationship with source so even if none of the code is open you can still strongly point to specific pieces of code that cause problems. The core issue with detailed explanations of the malicious behavior that trips over automated detection is that it enables malware authors to more easily hide malicious behavior.
F-Droid only carries FOSS. Technically, that wouldn't prohibit a malware vendor from getting their app into the catalog, but like the processes for package repositories for desktop distros, there's a lot of cultural, social, and procedural baggage associated with being the kind of project that gets distributed through those channels. Who's going to go through the effort? The whole point of shovelware is that it's a low-effort process.
Any app distribution platform carries with it a risk of hosting user-hostile software, so it is certainly not immune. Fortunately there are fewer incentives for trying to sneak such software into F-Droid which results in fewer (if any) straight up lies intended to trick users into buying misleading software or exposing their data for the sake of ad revenue.
This is of course the same issue we all face when opting to pull in an OSS dependency for our own projects (from npm or docker or rubygems or rust crates or...): we need to decide on our own how far to trust the software maintainers.
The android permissions model offers some degree of protection in both stores from hostile software. However, unlike the Play Store which offers only a couple of tags (contains in-app purchases / contains ads), in F-Droid any known "antifeatures" (i.e. association with paid services) are listed explicitly in the catalogue.
As for abandonware (or other software that F-Droid drops for practical concerns), users could still acquire the code and build it themselves, which means that a developer stepping away from a piece of software does not mean a user needs to say goodbye.
This whole industry-wide proactive campaign against misinformation since 2016 has been a disaster. COVID has helped amplified the flaws. The fact this was going to cause an endless amount of false positives negating the wider value proposition should have been obvious since day one.
The worst acts by powerful organizations are almost always done under the guise of 'helping people'. Nobody oppresses you for the sake of oppression. They'll do it under the banner of some good intentions.
Google shows why merely collecting the smartest minds from around the world in one place is not good enough on its own. They need proper leadership and strong values to guide them ... two things Google has long lacked.
Google should be more careful about banning high ranking/rated apps. It looks anti-competitive considering they want more people using Google podcasting app.
I'd like to think this was an accident somewhere down the chain and will be remedied in the morning. I love the app and hope it gets sorted out.
Why would google care at this point? Regulators world wide are basically useless. They might sue Google eventually and years later Google might settle for 1% of the profit they made as a result. So why would they ever care?
Podcast Addict is a great app. I came across it back when I was playing around with Tasker, and it was such a fun app to create tasks around simply because the developer has exposed so much through Intents. A really positive platform, such a shame to see Google quashing this sort of thing.
Google has an explicit notice up on YouTube Studio, at least, saying that they'll remove content that might not violate copyright because they are cutting back on human review. (It doesn't seem to occur to them that they could err on the side of not assuming copyright, though.) I'm sure this is part of the same trend.
They can't "err on the side of not assuming copyright". They have to block things first, ask questions later according to various laws and agreements around the world, or they will open themselves up to massive lawsuits, principally from big music labels.
Censorship simply does not scale. A centralized entity cannot get all the details correct, and a larger community has more diverging values. The more Google attempts to police information, the more wrong judgments it makes. It's inevitable.
Did it? Looking at the Google cache of the Play Store page, the only references I can find to covid, virus or similar terms are reviews saying they downloaded it because of the lockdown and are happy with it.
Meanwhile on Google's own podcast search engine https://podcasts.google.com/?q=covid-19. Content management teams are too powerful, this needs to be decided by some kind of content board within the company and not by one person who is leading the content management team within Google Play.
Wow, rather Orwellian. The referenced authorities aren't even in agreement on a lot of basics about covid, and had given false information on key aspects earlier. We can also rightfully draw some conclusions about covid, e.g. looking at data, without needing to be an official authority. Google has smart people, so this makes it all the more distressing.
I don't like this. Podcasts operate on open standards, anyone can launch an RSS feed which can then be played on any app.
Banning this app is like banning web browsers because the allow access "questionable" websites or banning search engines because they index such sites.
I hate how much (dis/mis)information is being spread about COVID-19, but banning an entire podcast app leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
This is exactly why we should stop those megalomaniacs at Google (or other) from taking over Podcasting... We don't want to repeat the same RSS mistake again.
If you respect and enjoy podcasts, don't use google apps.
Edit: my recommendation is AntennaPod. I used to use and love PocketCast until NPR effed it.
>has been suspended on the grounds that some of the podcasts it indexes reference the coronavirus but aren’t approved by government entities or public health organizations.
I don't know. The google should ban itself for they indexes reference the coronavirus but... oh well.
Wow, what a shitty move... Even if this is an automated process, this is still shitty. This app is one of a select few I think work perfectly, as it does exactly what I want it to do. It was also the first app I paid for since it was so good.
Given how much corporations pull the strings in America, how far away are we from China's authoritarian policies, especially as they relate to freedom of speech?
Other posters have rightfully pointed out that the internet is indeed open and free (for the most part), but good luck getting all of your friends to agree to use your new DIY whatsapp clone. Effectively, everyone who doesn't know how to standup their own website is completely at the mercy of these technology companies now.
Furthermore, the channels of communication most people use are now being forced through these tech companies because of recent events. The amount of control sitting under Google at this very moment is sickening.
Seriously think about it. If Google went completely AWOL, how much damage could they do to the world? How much control do they actually have over every Android handset and web user experience? I feel we need to start looking at Google in terms of the worst-case scenario, and then start planning policy around that. There is just too much at stake now.
Do Google offer a more censored version of Apple's Podcasts index? My favourite podcast app on iOS (Overcast) uses Apple's index as its source for search/recommendations (though obviously you can add any other feed yourself) and there's heaps and heaps of non-Government approved podcasts on the topic. If you run a Podcasting app on Android, does an index even exist that you can use and remain compliant?
It sounds like it is the indexing that's the issue here. Worth noting that if they ever crack down on Podcast apps being able to play non-indexed content they'll wipe out the whole Patreon economy around podcasts, which relies on sharing private feeds with subscribers.
This one seems to make me think that the app itself (or its play store listing) maybe has terms in metadata (to help with searching in the store maybe?)
Their automated system/review process is broken with respect to apps that render user generated content.
I've had several requests from Google over the last couple of years to make changes to my app to remove user generated content that is being rendered in the app. Sigh.
Yet another example of the dangers of handing Google a monopoly on Android app stores. If you control the means of distribution, you can control the content of what gets distributed. It is time for some anti-trust action here!
In the meantime consumers should support other app stores like https://f-droid.org/.
Looks like this is finally being sorted out. Tweet from Hiroshi Lockheimer an SVP at Google (which puts him in the top ~12 execs at the company):
Apologies to Podcast Addict fans today. We are still sorting out kinks in our process as we combat Covid misinformation, but this app should not have been removed. Carry on with your podcasts, folks! ️
I love Podcast Addict to the point of signing up for Patreon to support Xavier with a monthly donation. I'm all for doing thoughtful moderation to prevent your system being gamed by malign actors, but Google is clearly in the wrong here, and their implied policy of moderating with as few humans as possible means that a standout app is taking fire for a situation it could not possibly be accountable for.
Timing is suspicious, Google is finally beginning the final phase of Play Music shutdown, which means Google Podcasts will be the new way to access podcasts.
Because it makes a ton of sense to move music to YouTube music, but the podcasts to something entirely different.
They're blindly stumbling around making sure the public will think they're pretty deserving of any and all antitrust hammers than swing their way in the near future.
This just shows how bad our reaction was. We spent years looking for WMDs and came up empty handed. We should have done nothing, just like this situation. People are getting sick of this s*.
One can equally say the PATRIOT act was justified and saved lives. Many people here agreed with that for years until Snowden etc revealed that it was unjustified.
> One can equally say the PATRIOT act was justified and saved lives.
No, there's plenty of public evidence that lockdowns reduce the spread of COVID-19 and save lives; that's not true for the PATRIOT Act. So this is false, as well as being a red herring...
> Many people here agreed with that for years until Snowden etc revealed that it was unjustified.
I don't think that Snowden and other whistleblowers revealed that the PATRIOT Act was unjustified so much as that what was actually authorized by the PATRIOT Act was a drop in the bucket to what the US government was actually doing in surveillance.
The proximate result of which was Congress expanding surveillance authority to legalize much of what had been being done illegally (authority it is currently in the process of renewing), so clearly it's not even a universal conclusion, even now, that the unauthorized surveillance they revealed was unjustified.
I'm leery of what you may be trying to imply. That I think coronavirus was a conspiracy? No. Please don't head towards slander territory just because someone questions a piece of legislation.
I said "reminiscent", i.e it invokes memories. Hastily enacted, a blunt instrument, huge, sweeping changes to legislation, makes human rights organisations nervous etc.
You don't need conspiracies. Just naive people who think that in times of crisis you need to centralise power and who don't think through the consequences.
What does that mean in the UK context specifically ... for example, the COVID law repeals a reform that was made some years ago, after police finally caught the most prolific serial killer in history. He is believed to have killed perhaps 250 people without being caught, because he was a doctor who was forging death certificates. So the rules were changed to require multiple sign-offs on the cause of death, because multiple signoffs on cremation forms were the only way he was originally detected.
In the COVID panic that rule has been removed. Doctors can now put any cause of death they want without anyone checking them. In many countries there are now widespread reports of elderly relatives being assigned COVID as a cause of death in care homes, when the family members know they repeatedly tested negative and weren't sick.
Even better, the rule that said multiple psychiatry opinions are required to involuntarily commit someone was also repealed. In other words the government anticipated their policies would lead to both mass mental breakdown and civil disobedience; allowing a single doctor to effectively imprison someone indefinitely without any trial or any checks/balances at all, looks like a rather neat solution to that, doesn't it?
All these changes are in a sense well intentioned, the lawmakers believed speed is more important than accuracy. Those beliefs are wrong.
I think the implication is that there is always a block for government over-reach and waiting for a convenient excuse to execute it.
Just as the implication isn't that the PATRIOT act authors did 9/11, they certainly took the momentum of the aftermath of a tragedy to push their pre-existing agenda.
I agree it is being used to reduce freedoms, but I disagree that the parallel to terrorism is very good. Firstly, the risk from terrorism was always going to be sporadic and focused -- it is/was never an effective application of 'force'. For that you need a WMD arsenal like a State. COVID is directly and effectively killing people in massively higher numbers. Secondly, terrorism mitigation was always justified using details and intelligence that the people asking for power (military, intelligence agencies, boarder enforcement) would refuse to share. The public would not be privy to the justifications in the interests of National Security. Again, with COVID, we instead are getting statistics summaries from the government but they are being sourced from public sources of civilian interaction, namely hospitals, research labs, universities. The public can second-source and confirm the justifications. The interventions are currently being couched as temporary with some caveats regarding medical research and immunity. If COVID interventions become overly protracted, we the public can protest along with the current Trumpian crazies (who have the right very basal idea but are utterly confused and probably co-opted with regard to who they are shouting at and when they should have started shouting.) Terrorism threat assessment is privileged process. Quite different IMHO. Unfortunately only "time will tell" if COVID morphs into this secret control state in some way, currently it's all open-source. Until then, all power to the medical and epidemiology bodies and I will shout at anyone getting in THEIR way.
Like many others, this is also my favorite podcasting app.
Just a couple of weeks ago, I was using this exact app to listen to the "Making Sense" podcast by Sam Harris, on the topic of covid-19. This is clearly not a government source, but as usual, Sam probes with some of the most intelligent, nuanced questions on this topic. It would be sad to see discussions like these get suppressed with the rest under Google's policy.
I've been a Pixel/Nexus user for about a decade. I'm feeling it's finally time to get out of Google-land and move to a more open phone with F-Droid. I don't trust Google to use their power fairly. Any recommendations for devices?
Apple denied an update for one of my apps because in the What's new text I said "In the quarantine we've learned to make friends with bugs in the home, but in the app they must be CRUSHED"
They said "Inappropriate references to the COVID-19 pandemic"
I hadn't seen this discussed yet, but how did Google know that Podcast Addict was indexing corona-related content? What was the mechanism that triggered the ban? The developer's twitter said that he didn't include any corona keywords in the play store metadata, nor in the source code. The consensus seems to be that some automated system was too aggressive in banning.
My best guess is that the source for the info used to ban PA would be the reviews, i.e. someone posted a review mentioning "great podcasts about corona" or something. But I can't imagine it's that simple, because then I can just put "corona" in any review and get somebody's app banned.
Unless Google has some other way of tracking PA's content?
This is my favorite app. I even got the paid version with no ads. Is there a way we can continue to support the developer? The app is so good and non-commerical. :-(
I definitely agree that these enormous platforms should not be allowed to censor us. It's highly authoritarian that the monopolist owners of huge platforms can just shut off dissenting voices. (After all, what else does it mean to only allow government sources that so often lie as in the case with masks or with the safety of reopening?) In any case, you can't stop the conspiracy theories from being promoted by shutting off podcasts when the president of the US is promoting some of them. News is gonna cover it regardless.
I might be bitter, but I have little love for corporations and their role in the public debate. And I abhor that they play moral compass. Call me a cynic, but that is really beautiful and bold of them. Don't pay taxes, evade worker laws and be cynical enough to proudly present how diverse you are and at the same time let your workers rot in the warehouses (I am looking at you AWS). "Look at the blind, talk to the deaf, listen to the mute and prey on the weak!" seems to be there motto.
The quicker multinationals like this are broken up, the better. For me personally, this is another reason to try to not use Google or Alphabet, it is not easy, but not impossible (yet).
This is a huge part of the reason why I think we should go with mobile-first web design rather than build native apps that have to go through these stores. I have to build and deploy a mobile app on iOS and Android for work and it's a) a pain in the ass and b) we're at the mercy of these two megacorporations.
If you can get by without a separate mobile app, do so. And if you need some functionality, consider pushing for that to be a part of the web standard and contributing to whatever projects can make that functionality accessible through the browsers.
It's time to regulate Google, Facebook, and Twitter as Common Carriers. They can control the pipes, but not the content flowing through them, like the phone company.
I had the same issue. I developed a legit and anonymous contact-tracing app [1], and there is no way I can easily distribute it on the app stores as Google and Apple unconditionally ban any app that makes any reference to the current pandemic.
They should ban Chrome from the Play Store because I can access non-approved Covid-19 content through it.
I say this sarcastically now, but web browsers will definitely become tools of censorship in the near future. Chrome itself will start blocking non-approved content. The Internet will no longer allow the distribution of any and all information, but only what is "approved".
I haven't seen this mentioned, but if this was the result of an automated process with no human review, do apps from com.google.* have a hardcoded exemption? Is there a low paid outsourced staff somewhere that provides the same exemption function? Are there any examples of Google's automated processes banning any of their own apps (or the entire account....)?
I'm impressed they actually gave a reason, what happened to "please RTFM for our terms and conditions" and "sorry I have given all the information I have, there is nothing more I can do, appeal denied"
Sadly, SoundWaves is super buggy if you have a larger font size set, and it's auto-playlist function is super annoying.
I prefer AntennaPod, another open-source app podcast app that's much less opinionated and has a few more features (but not bloated like most podcast apps).
Does anyone at Google realize how toxic this is for their brand? When I see stuff like this, as a developer I think:
- 1. Wow, I'm never building an Android app if I can build a web app instead.
- 2. There is no way I am ever switching from an iPhone to an Android phone if apps get censored like this (although I'm sure Apple does similar things).
Like others in this thread, I use this app every day. Just a few weeks ago I was thinking about how much benefit I've gotten out of it and decided to get the paid version to give something back. On the rare occasions when I've had issues, my bug reports have gotten quick, friendly and useful responses from Xavier.
So would they have banned an app that told people to wear masks when the CDC and WHO said they were not effective? I proudly went against government advice then and plan on doing a lot of things against government advice in the future. This pandemic has highlighted the rot in government institutions.
Google is under a great deal of scrutiny by governments right now. Their collective fight-or-flight behavior has kicked in and they're starting to exhibit some pretty crazy behavior.
There's never been a better time to excise Google from your life, or if you work there, to excise your life from theirs.
I used to think the internet was this great place resistant to censorship and government intervention. Instead you now have to tip-toe around and every comment ist tied to your real identity forever. At least I‘m using Apple, so pissing off Google won’t mean I can’t use electronic payments.
> What Google is asking of Podcast Addict would be comparable to Google asking a web browser app to remove references to all the websites and social media posts that reference the coronavirus unless the reference comes from an official government entity or public health organization.
Or asking reddit to censor content and keywords when displaying user-generated content while using their app on Android.
This is unhealthy behavior towards the open web, which Google seems to work aggressively towards its full control through web browser, ads, and cloud computing.
Seems like a mistake by an automated system. It's a bummer that there's infrequent mixups like this, but I do wonder what the alternative is. YouTube faces a similarly hard moderation problem. There's nothing they could do to appease even just 90% of criticisms.
This is obviously overreach in my opinion, and (tangentially) might explain the bump in installs for my podcast player. I had a feature on COVID, guess I’m going to remove that... (I know that doesn’t protect the app from removal, but could delay it, I don’t know)
Pretty ironic given that an "official government source" advocated the ineffective and dangerous drug hydroxychloroquine and suggested people inject bleach into their bodies.
Edit: Changed hydroxyquinone to the correct hydroxychloroquine.
Where is the proof of inefficacy? For the record, there's no proof of efficacy either, because all the trials done that prove or disprove efficacy of hydroxychloroquine were flawed in one point or the other (at least the ones I've read).
To give an answer to this endless debate, a proper, randomized clinical trial is needed. And the conditions set correctly, too: lopinavir and ritonavir were, per NEJM, not successful, but a later study in Lancet showed that administration at earlier time points (within 7 days of symptom onset) might be working and needs more investigation.
I know Novartis is running a trial, and so is U of Minnesota[1] which has finally completed enrollment and will release results after peer review.
Oh, and more on topic, it looks like Twitter has blocked a legitimate page of the Canadian part of the same group of trials[2].
It doesn't work that way. New drugs are assumed ineffective until proven otherwise. A government official with no medical training recommending an unproven drug based on a few anecdotes is the height of irresponsibility.
Currently the studies can't tell if HCQ is effective or not because all of them have been wasted opportunities for many different reasons, from too few patients, to absence of controls, to too late administration (the NEJM paper and the Lancet paper on lopinavir/ritonavir tell important lessons on this topic). We're in the "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" territory.
I would say HCQ is a "lead" in the pharmacological sense (after all there's an effect in vitro), but of course there's no guarantee it will work properly (work as in "higher efficacy than placebo or other treatments") in vivo.
The reason for my comment is that the announcement by the "government official" (who was not the first, the first being the eccentric Dr.Raoult) turned what should have been scientific debate into a political flamefest (at least in the media). And science (aka, proper, randomized clinical trials) got lost in the way (at some point the U of Minnesota trial struggled to get new people).
I personally don't have any particular love for HCQ: chances are, like remedisivir, that if there is an effect, it is small. But I want to point out that so far science is still out on this one.
> I would say HCQ is a "lead" in the pharmacological sense
Agreed. I hope it gets proven effective too. This is a hot button issue for me because a family member needs HCQ for lupus and now cannot obtain it because of the statements of said government official. His words have caused actual harm, and this isn't the first time.
Studies are coming in daily showing no benefit from HCQ. As this article [1] points out, any other drug would not be looked at further given the current set of information. But, since HCQ has been seen as a cure, a lot more time and money will be spent showing the same results - no effect.
Most of these are retrospective and observational, and they fail to answer the question posed by the very controversial (and flawed) Raoult paper: that is, that early administration during the course of the disease provides a clinical benefit. Also in many the control is standard of care, which can mean everything and nothing.
The positive studies suffer from the same issues, by the way. Especially controls are pretty bad.
These studies can't give the answers that a proper randomized controlled trial (against placebo), like the U of Minnesota one (but there are a few others) can.
Some studies focus on mortality, but I doubt HCQ helps there: like remedisivir, the measure should be time to symptom clearance / hospital discharge. Time of administration also matters a lot (see again the NEJM paper on lopinavir / ritonavir, a failure, then the Lancet paper that gives more insight at earlier time points). One study I've read gave HCQ at 16 days post symptom onset (median): that time is definitely too late for any antiviral therapy.
I reiterate: I have no personal interest in having HCQ succeed. What I want to see is good science.
There seems to be this mistaken idea that smartphones are like small PCs that can make phone calls. But they're really far more like gaming consoles. They're pretty much locked down.
Google Anthos is an attempt to do the same with business software? Soon, if you have to list your business software in Anthos store, you will be at mercy of Google.
The author has to blame himself that he is selling his app in the Google Play store. Then, of course, the author is exposed to Google's despotism. Sell the .apk somewhere else.
What a load of garbage, next they'll ban overcast because they let people subscribe to RSS feeds, and some people have hard left/right wing podcasts, or anything you want to see that's not mainstream.
I really hate how Google and Facebook have become "Ministries of truth". Especially since they are some of the most agenda ridden, scummy companies in existence. And you can down vote me straight to hell and back for that statement, it doesn't make it any less true.
It's sad to see an American company stooping to basically tin-pot levels of disrespect for human rights.
Contact the FTC, because this is an example of Google leveraging a non-arms-length arrangement to interfere with and exclude competitors to their own products Google Podcasts and YouTube which directly violate the policy they are applying to Podcast Addict.
There is no legitimate business function served by this inconsistent conduct, and it looks like a textbook case of single-firm anticompetitive conduct.
I just noticed that this is the same shit right wing organization that conveniently protects alt-right stuff when it gets banned from somewhere. Can we please not promote this kind of stuff here?
Really disturbing that I had to scroll right to the bottom of the page to find someone questioning the source of this.
While obviously Podcast Addict does not deserve a ban, the sheer number of people in this thread advocating unrestricted speech around COVID-19 is thoroughly disturbing. This despite the carnage that the disease is wreaking in the US and UK right now, and the fact that conspiracy theories spread on Google and Facebook platforms have certainly added significant fuel to the fire of COVID-19.
Even down here in NZ we're dealing with cell towers being set alight due to batshit conspiracy theories spread on Facebook and Youtube. I'm generally very much pro-free speech, but this is one thing that needs to be stamped down on fast, mainly due to more and more americans gathering in large protests and spreading the virus.
> While obviously Podcast Addict does not deserve a ban, the sheer number of people in this thread advocating unrestricted speech around COVID-19 is thoroughly disturbing.
Are you sure that advocating a "stamp down" won't throw away the baby with the bathwater? In my country, a lot of now very legitimate theories (thrombosis and treatment with heparin, convalescent plasma therapy) were slammed by certain very prominent experts at first ("baloney", "colossal idiocy"). What would've happened if Twitter or Google decided to remove the "controversial" theories?
Also, Twitter now is blocking an URL of a legitimate university promoting a trial with hydroxychloroquine. As you can see, to remove the "batshit conspiracy theories" we are also removing good science.
Works fine for me. Sounds like automated filter kicking in, which is a double-edged sword, but in itself doesn't say anything abt Twitter's stance here.
> While obviously Podcast Addict does not deserve a ban, the sheer number of people in this thread advocating unrestricted speech around COVID-19 is thoroughly disturbing. This despite the carnage that the disease is wreaking in the US and UK right now, and the fact that conspiracy theories spread on Google and Facebook platforms have certainly added significant fuel to the fire of COVID-19.
There's no other solution to this problem. If they suspend Podcast Addict, realistically, they need to suspend every other podcast app on the store. Then they need to start filtering out all podcasts with episodes about coronavirus on their own podcast app, or their need to suspend that too.
And that's before considering that there's a lot of valuable discussion about the virus happening that isn't coming out of the CDC or whatever other official source you're adamant about following. I'm not talking Joe Rogan. I'm talking PBS, NPR, 538, JAMA, etc. At some point all you're doing is suppressing legitimate journalism (and yes, there's a fuckload of legitimate journalism on podcasts) or even academic sources (yes, they exist as podcasts too).
I don't see what benefit you're getting from suppressing freedom of speech in such a draconian way when there's so much unnecessary collateral damage. All you're doing is making it harder for legitimate coverage to reach people ... which seems like shooting yourself in the foot.
Even beyond journalism, there's a lot of "slice of life" episodes talking about how people are affected by the virus day-to-day. How people's lives have changed. How they're coping. Why would you be in favour of suppressing that?
Good. When private companies see that something they are doing or enabling could lead to preventable human death, they have a responsibility to act on it.
If an app in their marketplace is helping spread misinformation about a public health crisis, that app can and should be removed from Google's marketplace.
America is a capitalist society. If you're going to do business in Google's ecosystem, you have to follow Google's rules. Google isn't tolerating COVID-19 misinformation, so if you're an app publisher in Google's ecosystem, you should adopt a similar stance.
Human life is on the line here. Google is doing the right thing.
This is disgusting, Google has become disgusting..
This is exactly why Google and maybe other large corporations absolutely need to get split up. I hope Trump takes action against US tech companies as he have said he would. Very few things would make me happier as an european.
This actually feels like an intentional move by Google to NOT get split up. Don’t worry government, we got your back! We’ll ban things that aren’t approved by you!
No, it's a service to public health to take down crap. People spreading "covid19 is fake" propaganda are literally getting themselves, their parents and friends killed. Freedom of speech also comes with responsibility - the responsibility of not endangering others with your speech. Similar as inciting hatred and screaming "fire" in a crowded restaurant will earn you jail time, people should be happy it's only their YT channel killed and not their sorry asses landing in jail!
I would have no problem if covid19 was taking out only those propaganda spouting idiots from the gene pool, but unlike let's say people ignoring gun safety laws and pointing a loaded shotgun at their feet which then goes off and blasts their feet away but like as with antivaxxers, anything involving infectious diseases also endangers innocent people. Mothers, fathers, children, the weakest of societies.
I am incredibly lucky to not have lost someone close to me to the 'rona, but other people I know have not been that lucky. So every time I hear someone "we gotta open up for the economy!!!" I'd like to throw these idiots in a jail cell and let the keys sink to the bottom of the Mariana Trench out of empathy for those affected by the reality.
Second, this is an index of all podcasts. If you are going to ban index searches google should also ban their own search engine because right now I can search for plenty of corona propaganda using it.
You do realize that google's policy isn't just targeting the "corona is fake news" crowd, right? The wording says any app "referencing COVID-19" not published/endorsed by the government or a public health organization got to go.
If google applied this consistently it should have to ban the following apps: Google Chrome[1], Firefox[1], Opera[1], Google[2], Google News[3], Google Podcast[2], Netflix[4], Youtube[3], Play Store[2, 3], any news/journalism organization (including CNN, PBS, NYTimes, BBC (uk), ARD/ZDF (de)), reddit[3], twitter[3], facebook[3], and plenty plenty more.
But at least Jair Bolsonaro is still free to put out fake news apps if he wants because he is head of the government...
[1] Allows access to sites such as google[2].
[2] Allows access to "fake news". And it has a covid warning section linking to (thereby endorsing) non-approved sources such as wikipedia.
[3] Displays/Links to a lot of non-government approved journalism and "journalism".
See also this related Ask HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221447
Similar thing happened to me with my game. You can read the story here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229073
My favorite (and only) podcasting app. I hope someone who works at Google reads this and flag it internally.
This quote really sums up how ridiculous Google is being:
> What Google is asking of Podcast Addict would be comparable to Google asking a web browser app to remove references to all the websites and social media posts that reference the coronavirus unless the reference comes from an official government entity or public health organization.
> asking a web browser app to remove references to all the websites and social media posts
Except usually a web browser doesn't include a index of sites, You go to a another site (Google/Bing) for that. If a browser does include "recommended sites" the landing pages of those sites best keep to Google's and Apples rules. For an extreme example, If Firefox was promoting PornHub on the new tab page we could understand why Google or Apple would tell them to cut it out, but it doesn't stop you from visiting the site.
I'm not saying I agree with what Google have done here (IMO they should re-instate Podcast Addict), Just that I can see why Google could think "recommended podcasts" and podcast indexes come under the "included content" of an app.
EDIT: As others has said here, It's more like Google banning YouTube because it contains video's about covid 19 which don't come from "approved sources" (Though Google did demonetize people for talking about it and de-rank non "approved sources")
I would disagree in saying it's like Google banning YouTube as YouTube both hosts the actual data as well as filters the data that gets put onto the platform.
Yeah podcast app's rarely host the content themselves (though some do mirror the files to their own CDN's and Spotify have recently started doing exclusive podcasts).
It was more that Podcast app's come with a curated list of podcasts and a search feature backed into the application then the actual hosting of the content.
Podcast apps commonly host indexes for the same reason Google or Bing or another search engine ships with most browsers. Users don’t know, and don’t care, about URLs, especially RSS feed URLs. They (we) just want to type in something and tap on the thing they wanted, instant gratification. Most apps generally don’t spider or find their own content, instead they re-index public indexes, the most common of which is Apple’s Podcasts directory formerly from iTunes. As pointed out, Google also has a directory. It’s a convenience for listeners to more easily find shows.
I say this because I remember the days before Apple’s Podcast directory when it was often easier to Google and listen in your browser or copy it on to a music player via drag and drop than it was to remember to launch an app that would do the downloading for you. (Partly because you still had to remember to connect and/or sync the player, and worry about disk space etc.) Nowadays, subscribing and listening via phone is so easy that I probably download 100x the shows I used to and barely listen to 5%. These days I use the apps as sources of possible content to listen to, but I would be really annoyed if some of the content disappeared with no warning, particularly if it was one daily/weekly episode that covered COVID.
So it’s like Google banning a Bing, DDG, or (...) Google search app app for Indexing sites that do not follow approved guidelines.
OP’s point stands without modification.
But a search app isn't directly a web browser (Though browsing many be a secondary function). But many adult content search apps have been removed from app stores.
With the Advent of the omnibar, they are necessarily search engines
An argument there could be that the user still gets to choose which search engine the omnibar gets sent to.
I don't agree with Googles decision (I strongly disagree with it). Just stating that under the letter of the law (of the app stores policies) I can see why app stores feel they have the power to govern the search results in such apps (iirc web browsers have a exception to the clause - /me goes to double check Googles policy on web browsers - brb)
EDIT: With a quick 5 min glance at the policy it looks like Google have been extremely heavy handed because "Any apps referencing COVID-19, or related terms, in any form in their metadata will only be approved for distribution in the Play Store if they are published, commissioned or authorised by one of these entities." But podcasts in their search couldn't be in their play store meta data. (Still digging)
https://twitter.com/PodcastAddict/status/1261805845735604224...
Nothing in the metadata. Pure evil.
The bar you set was "Except usually a web browser doesn't include a index of sites". And I see a direct parallel with Google holding a pod cast app responsible for the podcasts content as there is to Google which keeps a more complete index of the content of web sites than the podcast app does of podcast contents.
It's more like Google self-banning Google (or Bing) for displaying non-approved content. Searchengines index external sources and display it to the user, which is the same what a Podcast-app does, isn't it?
YouTube constantly recommends me COVID-19 conspiracy videos since I dared to watch one that was popular here in Germany. Basically on every video I watch I have now german conspiracy videos as recommendations. I did neither like the video or did I subscribe the channel.
It's beyond fucked up what Google is doing.
If you want to watch something one-off, some interesting tidbit outside of your curated feed then doing it in incognito mode is required, otherwise, as you noted you are doomed.
If you find it here and delete it, I think it will cease to influence your recommended videos.
https://www.youtube.com/feed/history
We shouldn’t have to jump through these kinds of hoops. Their recommendation engine is smart enough to discern between a one off video watch and a genuine interest, but youtube gets stuck on recommending conspiracyland videos. It’s at the point where I just ignore the entire section as if it were ads.
I want a tool to work without having to sift through hundreds and hundreds of videos and try to guess which one caused the drift into crazy town.
I have YouTube history turned off along with other publicly visible tracking and this kind of nonsense still happens to me. Their algo is working on more data than just what they make visible to the user.
"The only winning move is not to play."
You have to evict all Google tracking cookies. Just disabling a few features won't cut it.
Alternatively if you’re never logged in and reject all cookies, then you never have this issue at all.
You also get to see just how low the lowest common denominator of society is for the default recommendations.
Yup. It's just what do these recommendations do to the society? If you are suspectible to believe certain content for whatever reasons you are basically doomed as you get caged into an echo chamber that only validates the bullshit that is fed to you.
If you're logged into YT, you can try deleting the video from your watch history.
Yeah, I've been doing this a lot lately. It's kind of disappointing how easily the recommendations shift once you click on a video that's sketchy.
In my case, I once made the bad decision to watch a Jordan Peterson video. By itself it wasn't crazy, he was mildly provocative, a little paternalistic, not my cup of tea. But geez, the trash that then ended up appearing in the side bar after that was awful. I find that if I watch some "bad" videos, I have to spend a fair amount of time culling shit out of the subsequent recommendations.
Another way to keep your feed from being polluted is simply to create "garbage user" that you toggle to if you want to view potentially garbage content.
What I really wish youtube did was to allow users to filter out videos that contain keywords we choose, like twitter's somewhat effective "muted words" list.
"It's kind of disappointing how easily the recommendations shift once you click on a video that's sketchy."
It isn't just "sketchy" videos. Someone linked me to a video of a dog being rescued, which I watched on my logged-in profile, and it was fine and all, but explaining to YouTube that that doesn't mean I'm interested in hearing about every dog ever rescued (since I didn't know about the 'delete from history' trick) has been a lot of "Never show me videos from this channel" button pushed.
So you effectively desire a way to build your own bubble, and cast it in stone, and also give even more information to Google (what you do not like) ???
My feeling is they pushing the extra crazy ones though. Watching a clearly not well Person argue crazy theories isn't very convincing to healthy people anyway.
On the other Hand people like Dr. Erickson get censored, because they simply dare to question the lock down and argue that there is no evidence supporting it's effectiveness in saving lives.
It might have been correct to say there's no evidence in March (which is not a reason to not do something, we would still be in the Stone Age if every action we took required evidence.). There's plenty of evidence now as we have data for both going into and coming out of lockdown.
There's plenty of weird, contradictory evidence. Many places have come out of lockdown early, been told they're facing certain doom ("Georgia's Experiment in Human Sacrifice" [1]), and then been quietly forgotten when the predicted consequences don't come. It's hard to believe that lockdowns don't do anything at all, but I don't think anyone can honestly say we have definitive proof they were necessary.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/why-georg...
I can. R0~5.7 has dropped below 1.0 in many mask-averse stay-at-home regions, which I consider compelling evidence of efficacy in an adverse environment, under common-sense priors informed by the medical literature.
"This number is below 1.0" is not, by itself, an argument that some particular social policy was necessary or effective. An argument that lockdowns were necessary would at a minimum need to address the questions of "would a less strict policy have sufficed" and "will the long-term outcome after lockdowns end be different".
Georgia has 164 deaths per million residents, versus 82 in South Carolina next door and 87 in California. Are you sure you still want to call that a bad prediction?
> On the other Hand people like Dr. Erickson get censored, because they simply dare to question the lock down
Erickson, among other things, makes provably false statements about the prevalence and mortality of covid19. You’re allowed to be misinformed as a private citizen; you’re not allowed to grandstand in public as a physician and spread misinformation. He’s lucky he only got deplatformed, rather than have his license taken.
You make it sound like he was expressing an unpopular interpretation of the data, rather than actively spreading untrue assertions.
> Erickson, among other things, makes provably false statements about the prevalence and mortality of covid19.
Such as?
> you’re not allowed to grandstand in public as a physician and spread misinformation
For all I know Erickson is saying no one died of Covid or something that ridiculous/obviously false, but labelling statements as misinformation and censoring them instead of retracting endorsements and getting others to realize those statements are false is an aggressive seize of power by authorities over what is or isn’t true.
I realize authoritative knowledge is necessary; not everyone has the time or ability to parse through medical information and come to reasonable conclusions.
But authoritative bodies should have to earn their authority from the public, not use censorious platforms to assert it. The fundamental problem we’re running into now with misinformation is a lack of trust, not a lack of information. Forcing people to listen to sources they don’t trust and blocking sources they do trust will make the situation worse.
If people trust a crackpot more than they trust an established authoritative body, that authoritative body should take a real hard look at themselves in the mirror and ask themselves why that’s the case.
That's why I never watch any video on logged in YouTube that may not interest me. Better right click and use anonymous window.
There are plugins for Firefox to hide all recommendations and the start page of YouTube. Did this a couple of months back, and it has honestly made me happier and with a lot more control over watchtime etc.
I now live in the Subscription section, and it's great!
Wait until you get into the dystopian world of clips on YouTube targeted at children.
What about google podcasts which literally lists and plays the same podcasts about covid?
> > asking a web browser app to remove references to all the websites and social media posts
> Except usually a web browser doesn't include a index of sites, You go to a another site (Google/Bing) for that.</i>
OK then, it is like asking a search/video/advertising company to remove all such references from its search, and hosted videos, and other properties, and banning their apps & services until they do.
I don't see the youtube app being banned for all the C19 rubbish they are currently hosting and indexing. Or the Google news app for the C19 rubish it is indexing and actively pushing to some people (depending on what the relevant sacred algorithm, hallowed be its name, decides who should see).
What they appear to be expecting Podcast Addict to do is exactly what they themselves have said they can't do. Either it is not possible (this is the case IMO) in which case it is not fair to expect it of PcA, or it is possible and Google are hypocrites of the highest order in this matter.
EDIT: after reading the rest of TFA...
Even worse "additionally, Google isn’t applying these same rules to its own podcast app – Google Podcasts" - we don't even need to argue service equivalence to show that as hypocritical.
Of course this is most likely to be an undesirable side effect of some automated system. I'll give Google that benefit of the doubt if they reinstate PcA immediately and apologise for their cock-up.
> I'll give Google that benefit of the doubt if they reinstate PcA immediately and apologise for their cock-up.
Why? It's not as if no one in Google knew that this would happen. I don't think Grace Hopper's 'Better to ask forgiveness than permission' applies here. Google knew what they were doing when they instituted the rule and their behaviour suggests malice aforethought.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/06/19/forgive/
> If a browser does include "recommended sites" the landing pages of those sites best keep to Google's and Apples rules.
You mean sites like the BBC? That's where all the COVID-19 related content I have listened to with Podcast Addict came from. Is the BBC supposed to kowtow to Google's self serving rules and propaganda?
More like:
> What Google is asking of Podcast Addict would be comparable to Google asking Google to remove all references to the websites and social media posts that reference the coronavirus unless the reference comes from an official government entity or public health organization.
You can try Pocket Casts [1] who are my favorite and only
Of course that's assuming that they don't get the same play store treatment from GOOG
It's a little too ironic that Goggle, who has countless times made the argument that they aren't responsible/liable for what their users do on a service ("honestly senator its just a platform we provide"), and then here they are the ones calling for some downstream accountability. Not that I agree at all with the logic- you may as well say that a bank is responsible(liable) for the use of any money they lend out ;} -- but its the hypocrisy that stinks to high heaven here!
[1] https://www.pocketcasts.com/
Maybe this is the effect of continuously putting liability on them? You should account the timeline into your thinking, it's not happening at the same time.
it's the effect of trying to avoid regulation by self-regulating. after trump got elected, one of the big media narratives was that it happened because of misinformation ("fake news"); the response has been censorship by platform owners to avoid the charge in the future and any potential federal action
Why do you think so? How do you know it's not the response to multiple attempts to put liability for content on platform owners like Google and Facebook? How do you know they did not respond strongly because most governments have declared state of crisis, which means more severe punishment, and punishment of things that would be OK otherwise (and of course nobody knows what that actually means, let alone all around the world)?
there can be more than one reason, but the censorship began in earnest after trump's election and before covid.[1] this isn't even a controversial position and i'm nowhere near the only person to have remarked upon it.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2018/08/06/636030043/youtube-apple-and-f...
It didn't start after Trump's election. It started with the "cancel culture" thing a couple of years before that and pressure on companies to participate in the war on crimethink.
I tend to think that it contributed to Trump's election, because it has the effect of creating massive polarization.
You can't segregate sites by viewpoint and thought filter everything in favor of one side or the other and expect it not to devolve into extremist conflict.
But the people doing this didn't want to admit that they caused the problem to begin with, so instead they double down.
The modern polarization of the media began in the 1990s with Newt Gingrich...with help from his patron Rupert Murdoch, an ultra-conservative Australian who owned television stations, tabloids, and newspapers in the US, Australia, and the UK.
Before them, politics was still very cutthroat but not polarized along party lines.
This- among side the cable news cycle effect were the genesis of today’s virus.
Have to say — Murdoch has been remarkably influential as a massive negative impact on humanity
I could say the same about disney, their ownership of certain networks and their ability to influence politica to single handledly redefine trademark laws on behalf of the US government
Talk about impact.
Truth is in the eye of the beholder
True - but something happened in the 2010's when Big Tech started taking sides in a way it hadn't before. I cannot picture Google doing this when it was still Google.
> The modern polarization of the media began in the 1990s with Newt Gingrich...with help from his patron Rupert Murdoch, an ultra-conservative Australian who owned television stations, tabloids, and newspapers in the US, Australia, and the UK.
That was certainly a thing that happened, but as far as I know Rupert Murdoch never got Gore Vidal blacklisted by book publishers or whatever.
It's one thing to say your piece, something else to stop the other guy saying theirs.
It seems very similar to McCarthyism and the anti-communist messages from the late '40s and early '50s like the "loyalty review boards", just with wider media available in the modern world. McCarthyism also adopted similar conspiracy theories concerning vaccinations, mental health care, and fluoridation.
There were sweeping purges on Twitter after the elections. The official story was that these were 'bots' or 'trolls', but lots of good accounts got permanently deleted. It happened two or three times as I recall. You'd wake up and see that your follower count had mysteriously plunged overnight indicating another crop of bannings.
Don't worry, Pocket Casts is a much bigger developer. They can generate the necessary online outrage to get relisted. It's the small guys that get shafted.
And this is how we end up with monopolies. "Well intentioned" policies designed for giant companies only.
Or you can just not drop an app that just became the victim of corporate censorship.
Why is this topic not coming up more often? There is heavy censorship in play here at the same levels as China and Russia.
Because many times the conversation frustratingly becomes a turtles all the way down slugfest between the loud “it’s their platform and they can do what they want” crowd vs. the equally loud “free speech is an absolute” officiated by the “censorship only matters if the government does it” crowd.
Call this an oversimplification of a nuanced issue if you want. Because it is. I’m not shying from it. Just doesn’t seem all that much different from the amount of nuance that goes into and subsequently comes out of the kinds of flame wars commonly immolating this topic anyway.
This is just opinion though, I wouldn’t encourage anyone try to unearth anything objective out of it beyond what pleasantry is warranted for such idle (and wholly inane) thought.
That's not a solution. Instead, we should switch to alternative stores like F-Droid:
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.danoeh.antennapod/
F-Droid only lists FOSS software, but Google sorely needs competition. Unfortunately, any alternative store is unlikely to succeed since the users only have incentive to use it when Google misbehaves, so all Google has to do is misbehave rarely enough to kill the alternatives off.
F-Droid is great, it has been years since I've had to use the app store.
I have yet to find better then AntennaPod[0]
[0]: https://github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaPod/
I'm glad it works for you. I actually tried to switch in an effort to "more FOSS" my life and ended up compiling a concrete list of usability problems that made using Antenna Pod frustrating for me. And that "usability" word has traditionally been the difference in my life between a commercial product and a FOSS one
* Podcast Addict offers auto skip intro seconds, auto skip outro seconds -- and the seconds setting is per podcast
* P.A. offers "stop after episode" if the sleep timer is active, and also allows not marking the episode as played if that "artificial stop" is active
* in Antenna Pod, "delete and remove from queue" does not clear it from the now playing bar
* the "auto download" appears to be opt-in, not opt-out, meaning one must set it for all 85 podcasts
* the bamboo menu doesn't include "delete" for an episode
* and a few more UI nits that bugged me
This isn't a rant, but rather an observation that the Podcast Addict developer wakes up every day thinking about how to make P.A. better, and that doesn't seem to be true for Antenna Pod
And who says that Google won't do that?
Now is the perfect time to get more censorship in place, be it for commercial or policial reasons.
I am not a fan of app stores due to these kinds of ecosystem issues, and could never find any good web only podcast players, so I just made my own. It's public but it only really has podcasts I like in the directory.
Overcast has a web player.
AntennaPod[1] (my favorite and only) is open source and distributed through F-Droid, so it can't be arbitrily removed by Google. (And if for some reason it were to be removed from F-Froid, you can compile and install it yourself.)
[1] https://f-droid.org/app/de.danoeh.antennapod
At what point do industries just band together and develop their own app store? Sure third party app stores have far less visibility, but if all the major entertainment groups and content categories could agree on a single app store then it's hard to imagine them failing.
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.
ban the political party they don't like?
Make their bias really obvious like we have for the major media companies so consumers can make an easy choice.
There is indeed a problem here, and FAANG are being hamhanded and overaggressive in their response, but it's hard to find an overt bias that maps neatly onto the dominant (American?) political cleavage.
Much more often (as here), these companies are 1) making decisions in a way that allows them to abstract away and thus ignore the nuances of individual cases 2) putting the burden of implementation on underpaid workers who are not equipped to make these decisions and 3) reacting to any noticeable pushback by moving 200% in the opposite directions.
Locating the problem in Political motivations overlooks the economic incentives that monopolies have to 1) lobby/appease the people in power 2) use political opportunity to squelch competition and 3) treat their workers as disposable commodities.
Yeah, if you relay content at scale, your first preference is to do nothing for moderation. After a little taste of that, people get upset and complain, which is just a little inconvenient at first.
It becomes progressively more inconvenient once some of those people with complaints can subpoena you or fine you millions of dollars or exclude you from large markets.
So your next best option is hamfisted moderation.
Tuning things costs money and time,[0] it's generally easier to just shoot the moon on either false negatives or false positives.
[0] and given conflicting preferences from different powerful groups, is arguably impossible anyway
Or, "I tend to go with philosophers from Voltaire to Mill to Popper who say the only solution is to let everybody have their say and then try to figure it out in the marketplace of ideas. But none of those luminaries had to deal with online comment sections."
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...
EDIT: I should add, Podcast Addict is my go-to. I get how this can happen, but this is all really annoying and I feel for Xavier Guillemane and all the other users. Here's hoping the massive press blitz on this gets a quick reversal in this case, and Google finds a way to prevent it for apps with less visibility. Maybe we can enforce tuning by getting as upset as possible at the false positives.
>but it's hard to find an overt bias that maps neatly onto the dominant (American?) political cleavage.
What about things like google search suggestions being manipulated to hide unfavorable suggestions, but only for certain candidates? I remember seeing this happening real time after trying it one day per a reddit post and then a few days later per another reddit post that such suggestions had stopped showing.
The invention of the tools may have been orchestrated well outside of political leanings, but once invented and handed over for employees to use their application has follow political leanings.
I don't find it hard to believe that Google does things like this, but can you be more specific? What experiment can I run myself to verify that this happens?
> 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.
What kind of spam app detector is so bad that it doesn't claculate wirh maturity, popularity, and reviews?
The word used was scam, not spam
It won't work that way, and they know it. It's a slow game, requiring patience on their end. They'll get to it eventually.
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.
You don't think they would want that power?
what could go wrong with this approach
> HE IS A DOCTOR RUNNING A STUDY AT A MAJOR UNI, and twitter is telling him he is misinformation.
The best part is that they let actual fake news and misinformation run amok on their platforms.
> We need to go back to the web, where anybody could install Apache and off they went. Bandwidth is cheap now. BitTorrent exists.
the ISPs are a concern. these can turn into an even more dangerous monopoly. can there be a new internet? home antennas? or maybe a way to somehow remove ISPs from the equation. a free flow.
Meshnet projects like Yggdrasil[1] and Hyperboria could be able to do this. I'm rooting for Yggdrasil at the moment.
[1]: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ and
Arizona has beaches.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/travel/arizona/road-trips/20...
> We need to go back to the web, where anybody could install Apache and off they went. Bandwidth is cheap now. BitTorrent exists.
From your mouth to God's ears friend. I can't tell you enough how maddening it is to observe the way technology has evolved since the time I first encountered the net in 1998. My vision of the future was and remains a server in every home, powerful enough to handle all your digital communication/entertainment needs. Everyone with their website and domain, email etc. What a world that would have been! Well so much for that. All we did was bring back the AOL model in a different skin. The AOL guys must be so mad now, they were just too ahead of their time!
This is the result of out-sourcing juristic work to private companies:
If we treat Android, Window, Twitter, Facebook, as public spaces/goods, then private companies should not have a say in what is allowed/not-allowed on their platforms. This is work for the courts and police to decide and enforce.
If we treat those platforms as private. Then we are playing in s/o's backyard. You are totally at their mercy. They have every right to kick you out if they don't like your face. It's their property. You are a guest.
I think we need constituted digital public spaces and platforms with:
- democratic footing (users are in charge)
- public ownership
- division of power (politicians =!= judges =!= police)
- effective policing
In such a system it would be for independent courts to decide which Apps can be distributed and which not. Those courts would be bound to a constitution/body of law, which applies to all parties a like.
Yes, this will be expensive. Yes, you will have to give up some privacy. But you will be a citizen in a society, and not a stranger playing in a backyard.
Maybe the current platforms can be coerced into a system which approximates the above. But I have my doubts. I hope in 200years people will have figured this out, and will look back to this age as the digital dark ages.
If they want to be private someone will take them to court for advertising drugs or something like that. They should have stayed neutral.
I agree, that this would have been the better option for them. Now they are stuck with their conent-screening frams, and censoring algorithms. It's a mess.
Still. Even if they did take that turn. I don't think they would have stayed truly neutral. Lot's of ways to penalize competition without banning them from your platform. A wolf is a bad shepherd.
If they do nothing, someone will take them to court for promoting false information about COVID-19 that gets someone killed.
There is no win-win scenario on policy enforcement when a company gets big enough.
Nothing will come of this though, and the masses will continue to bleat about them being private entities that are allowed to do this.
That’s impossible. Congress exempted the entire internet from court on something like this. Look at the communications decency act.
only if they stay neutral. This goes beyond that.
This podcast goes into a lot of detail on what the CDA says: https://legaltalknetwork.com/podcasts/make-no-law/2019/08/de...
That's a common myth, and is completely wrong. In fact, it is almost 180 degrees wrong.
Before section 230, there had been a couple of court cases. One held that a particular provider was not liable for anything posted on it, because it did not do any filtering or blocking at all. Another held that a different provider was liable for what users posted, because it did do some filtering and blocking.
Congress felt these outcomes were wrong, and section 230 was specifically meant to make providers not liable for user provided content, regardless of whether or not they did any filtering or blocking.
And yet sites that aggregate illegal content are taken down by the government all the time, despite hosting none of it themselves. If you filter the wrong way, the government will hold you liable.
The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet:
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
-Section 230
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Twenty-Six-Words-That-Created-Interne...
Telcos are private. They are not allowed to disconnect calls when people are talking about things they don't like. They are not allowed to drop accounts for organizations saying things they don't like.
Electric companies are mostly private. They are not allowed to cut off electricity to people/orgs that say things they don't like.
People claim that internet platforms present a novel problem but telcos are a very good model for regulation.
Governments should ban large platforms (>10M users) from editorial discretion.
Telephone communications are one to one, not one to many, which makes their regulations largely irrelevant as a model for regulating one to many systems.
Telcos and utilities are regulated as common carriers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier
You really trust the US court system to be impartial?
Should Apple/Google be forced to carry pornographic apps? White supremacists apps? Apps that invade people’s privacy? Which government should hold this responsibility? Should we have an international committee deciding this?
Yes, as per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23221497
They are all considered “natural monopolies”. They are also regulated on the municipal level. Do you now want each city to regulate apps? Why stop there? Why not regulate what console makers can sell? every physical store can sell?
In my country >90% of smartphone users have Android. Yes I would call that a monopoly. Yes I think monopolies should be regulated. Not at the city level since that's ridiculous and sounds like a strawman. That comment was just an example of monopolies that need to be regulated.
Isn’t the whole beauty of Android that it is “open” and that you can sideload apps and you are not beholden to a “walled garden”?
As Epic found out, not if you want to remain on Google's good side. They were facing sanctions from Google due to their sideloading of Fortnight onto Android phones and tablets.
What “sanctions” were they facing? They were called out because their app was a security nightmare.
https://www.cnet.com/news/fortnites-battle-royale-with-andro...
My understanding is that the "vulnerability" here also exists on every computer or other device on which you download an installer to a public folder--any application can watch that folder and silently replace the file with another when the download completes. There's nothing special about that. Android has a secure internal storage area--but internal storage is often limited. It's gotten better, but my previous phone only had 8gb for both the OS and data to share.
I am not talking the US in particular here. I am saying these decisions should be made by courts not by private institutions, that have stakes in that game.
So instead of being made by private companies, they should be made by unelected partisan judges....
No?
That’s exactly the choice you make in the US.
I am not talking about any particular existing nation state. I am saying that the problems we are experiencing could be solved by having some form of "constituted digital public spaces and platforms". I am well aware of the practical difficulties in establishing these. But it's our inability to create those spaces that is hurting us here.
Please stop. The more we play this tit-for-tat game of political point scoring, the more it causes the whole system to degenerate. It is corrupting every facet of our society, to the point at which we're no longer able to be objective about life and death matters like the current pandemic.
You stop. Stop using $current_panic to justify trampling the parts of the constitution and the parts of the system you don't like. These are legitimate questions that need to be answered or we'll just be in a worse place in the future.
It's so transparent; any time there's some crisis, whether it's terrorism or guns or drugs or a pandemic, there are always people calling for us to ignore the actual issues of our system and ram some "fix" through because this time, no seriously, this time it's life or death and we have to act.
?
I'm largely agreeing with you. My only point is that we shouldn't allow courts and corporations to become politicized.
Isn’t it a little - like 200+ years - late for that?
We're approaching levels of hyperpartisanship not seen since the civil war. I don't think this is a healthy state of being for our country.
You think we all got together and sung Kum Bah Yah after the Civil War? Are you forgetting about the segregation? The Civil Rights Movement? Vietnam?
Are you arguing that there haven't been varying levels of unity and partisanship within American history?
As long as you ignore minorities and/or non-straight people.
No I’m just amazed that people are willing to give government more power - the same government who would like nothing more than to have more power to intrude on people’s life.
We're advocating moving this power from massive corporations to the government, because at least the government has some accountability, whereas Google has NONE.
Where is this accountability? The Senate by design has two senators regardless of the population of the state, meaning that if you live in a more populous state, you have less voting power than people living in the flyover states. The electoral college also biases the Presidential election to less populous states. Not to mention even in the House of Representatives the ratio between the parties doesn’t match the popular vote because of gerrymandering.
How “accountable” are judges with lifetime appointments?
Google is accountable. If they don’t give people what they want, people don’t give them money directly or indirectly.
In the US, bills (new laws) have to pass both the Senate and the House, and the House is population based. It's a system of checks and balances to ensure that large states and small states don't control each other. In theory, if a particular change is favored by one set and not the other, then it doesn't pass.
In practice it's a little murkier than that, but the way you presented it makes it sound like the system is just stacked to the benefit of the smaller states over the larger, when that is not the case.
Most regulations that are passed are not by law. They are passed by agencies like the FCC, FTC, FDA etc.
So let’s say this mythical law is passed where you give the government more power over private business. The actual execution of the law is going to be carried out by unelected regulatory agencies where your main recourse is unelected judges.
You are constructing a false choice.
We have a general principle of due process and contract law that can be applied here in insisting that "massive corporations" play nice. Reigning in "massive corporations" doesn't require any new governmental powers.
I'm saying this as someone who leans libertarian but I don't think that is in conflict with the concepts of due process and reasonable contracts. The Devil is always in the details but it isn't an either/or choice.
There is no law that says “play nice”. What laws are they in breach of by only allowing certain products to be sold in their store? Every retailer has the right to decide what is sold in their store. Especially since Android is supposedly “open” and you can sideload.
At various times, HN users want the government to decide what gets sold in Apple and Google’s stores and decide what Amazon can and can’t sell. I’ve even seen that they want the government to intervene when it comes to how the game console makers operate. I guess if it were up to them Nintendo should be forced to sell “Debbie Does Dallas” next to “Animal Crossing” in their online store.
IANAL but I think a major component of contract law involves ensuring that the contract is "reasonable". This is what I meant by "play nice". I realize that the definition of "reasonable" is complicated (thus "law school"). But for the purposes of an HN discussion, I think it suffices.
Maybe you're advocating that, but -- even as someone who is generally skeptical of corporate power and the presumed wonders of the marketplace, and more amenable to reasonable government regulation (as subjective as that clearly is) -- this sounds like a pretty dubious idea.
The government regulation that might be called for in situations like this is regulation that puts a few limits on corporate control of massive platforms, not regulation that just transfers that control to other entities. Make locking down platforms too tightly illegal: relax laws about reverse engineering, mandate side-loading. I don't think we need to take away Google or Apple's rights to say what they will and won't sell in their own digital storefronts, but I don't think those rights should necessarily extend to control over what users install on their own devices. The problem is when those are the only legal storefront (e.g., Apple's iOS App Store), or other storefronts are highly undiscoverable.
So now, in the case of Android, the complaint is that the alternatives don’t know how to market. Should we also break up the record labels and the book publishers because you can’t easily discover independent authors and musicians?
I argue that the government has essentially zero accountability, while the private sector has a huge degree.
Our bandwidth for holding government accountable is so limited as to be useless. Consider the federal gov't, since I think it's what you're mostly talking about anyway. We get to vote for
* 1x Presidential primary every 4 years, from a field of, let's say, 8 to be generous: 3 bits
* 1x President every 4 years, from a field of 4 at best: 2 bits
* 2x Senator primary every 6 years. Let's again say a field of 8: 3 bits
* 2x Senator every 6 years. Let's again say a field of 4: 2 bits
* 1x Representative primary every 2 years. Again, very generous field of 8: 3 bits
* 1x Representative every 2 years, field of 4: 2 bits
That gives us 5.4 bits/year of bandwidth to actually hold our elected officials accountable. Yes, we can write letters and stuff, but that doesn't really allow us to hold them accountable. 5.4 bits in a year is nowhere near enough to express our feelings on the myriad of topics that the government is fiddling with, so we have effectively zero control over those things.
Compare that with private sector. Even for entities like Google, we've got huge latitude to vote with our feet. We can use DuckDuckGo, etc. Our choices as consumers provides a comparatively enormous bandwidth.
> Even for entities like Google, we've got huge latitude to vote with our feet. We can use DuckDuckGo, etc.
Great, that's two options. Maybe there's half of another.
There is also Bing.
Really, I think we should call Google and Bing the real two and lump all the alternatives that reuse it into the "half".
>Yes, we can write letters and stuff, but that doesn't really allow us to hold them accountable
Public protests/rallies/marches do bring about change in government/government policies. Many politicians do care about their public image, and are susceptible to manipulation based on public pressure.
>Compare that with private sector. Even for entities like Google, we've got huge latitude to vote with our feet. We can use DuckDuckGo, etc. Our choices as consumers provides a comparatively enormous bandwidth.
Okay, so agreeing with you for the sake of argument - they provide a bandwidth, in theory, but what is the pointif nobody actually uses it? It is "effectively" zero accountability. No mass exodus from Google/Apple/Microsoft/Facebook/Twitter/Whatsapp/TikTok/insert bad company/...
So now we need the government to intervene for people's own good because people willingly give their money to Big Tech?
The government is a made-up construct we created to serve us. What the government should or shouldn't do is up to us.
In the political arena, the status quo is that each voter must choose one of:
A) I must vote for the Democrat candidate because the Republicans are evil and they'll subjugate women and minorities.
B) I must vote for the Republicans because the Democrats are evil and they'll turn us into a bunch of commies.
There is no room in today's political debate for even mention of finer points of free speech philosophy, when all we can do is scare people into voting for the lesser evil.
Many politicians do care about their public image, and are susceptible to manipulation based on public pressure.
And this is no less true in the private sector.
>And this is no less true in the private sector.
Well, of course there are nuances to anything, but CEOs are not elected by the public. They don't have "opponent" CEOs trying to milk their scandals in public ads for getting a job. Its different. Anyway, this conversation has totally gone off topic ! We'll just have to agree to disagree on some things, although I suspect we have more points that we agree on than not.
(Trying to act devil's advocate)
Google is a publicly listed company. Members of the public, either directly or indirectly partially own Google. Google has a duty towards its shareholders. Isn't that some accountability?
I know that not everyone owns Google stock. But I'm guessing hundreds of thousands of people do.
Google's shareholders generally have very different interests than its users do.
There is the solution of taking away power from the government to fix this. You would need to limit the punishment of people to be the same as corporations. For example, if a corporation commits negligence that kills people and gets fined 2% of its income, then the penalty for negligent homicide becomes a 2% yearly income with no jail time.
The problem is that right now the government will jail an individual and fine them many years worth of income but will not punish a corporation even a 1/100th of the penalty. Equalize that can be done by either granting or removing power from the government.
I don't see how that would work, because fining a corporation indirectly fines every employee they need to lay off and can no longer find a job. Of course, we should fine corporations more, but trying to treat a company like a person is just a stupid metaphor in general and extending that will lead you nowhere sane.
>I don't see how that would work, because fining a corporation indirectly fines every employee they need to lay off and can no longer find a job.
Do we stop putting people in prison if they have a child? Either we have to punish children by depriving them of a parent (potentially putting them into foster care) or we have to allow family status to be a factor in sentencing individuals (institutionalize discrimination on a protected class)?
Currently when we punish someone, little thought is given to secondary victims. I don't see why we would make an exclusion for corporations.
> Should Apple/Google be forced to carry pornographic apps? White supremacists apps? Apps that invade people’s privacy?
My computer allows racist pornography and its the greatest invention in the history of mankind. As far as I can tell, iPhones have not lived up to that legacy.
Yes, but should Apple be forced to sell it? You can buy a DVD player and a TV from Walmart that allows you to view pornographic and racist content but aren’t forced to sell it.
Apple preventing the sale of a product != Apple not selling a product.
I don't ask Apple for permission to visit a website on my iPhone. Why should I ask their permission to install applications? Would it be so awful if I were allowed to run my own software?
But you don’t have to ask Google permission to install software. So why are people asking for intervention in this case?
Choice is amazing. You had a choice to buy into Apple’s “walled garden” or buy an Android. You didn’t need the nanny state to make that choice for you.
You sort of do: before you sideload an app, you have to toggle a switch, agreeing that you are going to do something potentially unsafe. In the similar arrogant manner, they care about your safety purging Podcast Addict app, like parenting you.
The best solution would be an emergence of an Android fork and the corresponding platform, but this seems unlikely due to enormous (as in 100bn perhaps) startup capital required.
Do you propose any other constructive solutions?
Yes, so would you rather Google not warn users of the possible danger?
I would rather change some obsure the settings once (like tapping 5 times on phone info) than being pestered every time
Do you also log into your computer as root or administrator so you don't have to be bothered with pesky warnings?
There's a common standard for DVDs and a competitive market in them; if one maker won't sell what you want, another will. Apple should be either nationalised or broken up like Ma Bell, and the threat of the same should hang over any market where a handful of players capture enough marketshare to become a de facto cartel.
And since in this case we are talking about Google - you can already side load apps...
Apple has less than 50% of the market in the US and 15% of the market worldwide. People chose to use Apple without any coercion from the government.
But back to this case, people can choose to sideload apps on Android. So what’s the problem?
I expect them to be more impartial than a multinational for-profit company whose stakeholders care about little other than their bottom line.
Pornography and hate speech have plenty of legal precedent. And if I'm honest, if it's legal in a given country, why shouldn't it be available?
Are you paying attention to the actions of the modern judicial system in the US that votes along party lines?
You really think that judges with their own religious and political biases and with lifetime appointments “care about you”?
By that same token, are you paying attention to the actions being taken by Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon?
There are no clean actors here, but the difference between the judicial system and the big companies is that the judicial system has people who care about more than just profits.
It’s even worse. They care about their own ideologies that are often at odds with mine.
The difference is that it is much easier to not be beholden to the private corporations you mentioned than the government. Private corporations don’t have the power of the state to take away my liberty, property or life.
You do realize the context of this conversation, correct? We're not talking about your liberty, property, or life. We're talking about apps on a smartphone or tablet.
> Private corporations don’t have the power [] to take away my liberty, property or life.
No, they can only demand you come in for overtime, require you to move where they want you to, or force you to come in while sick, at the risk of taking away your job. A risk which is minor for some of us, but which is the equivalent of a threat of homelessness for others.
Yes and do you really think morality will never come into play if those decisions are made by the government? What are the chances that this government would go to bat for an app by Black Lives Matter as opposed to Focus on the Family?
> Should Apple/Google be forced to carry pornographic apps? White supremacists apps? Apps that invade people’s privacy? Which government should hold this responsibility? Should we have an international committee deciding this?
We already have a situation in which two companies effectively decide what can go on anyone's cellphone (sideloading is not and will not be a meaningful solution for any more than a fraction of a percent of users).
Why isn’t side loading viable for Android users?
Yes, yes, provided they're labeled properly, all of them, and no, respectively.
Edit: I guess the first two could use some labels as well, provided the labels aren't legible to parental controls or other nannyware.
The only thing that needs to be constitutionally challenged is whether discretionary content filtering constitutes agency in publication under section 230 of the CDA.
Do I understand you correctly that you're talking about whether discretionary content filtering by a platform makes them into a publisher? This would mean that protections that apply to platforms wouldn't apply to them anymore for things like copyright infringement, right?
Section 230 provides immunity to Google and similar for content posted by other users and services. The notion that section 230 requires that Google be neutral in order to maintain that protection is not in the text of the law, and appears to be made up out of whole cloth. I will quote the entirely of section 230 below, see for yourself.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
> the term “information content provider” means any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information
By selectively funding the development of information they favor, YouTube or app stores could be considered in part responsible for the creation of that information, in which case that section would not protect them, because they would then be the information content provider, not merely a provider of an interactive computer service.
That strikes me as a theory that began with a desired outcome first, as the law does not use the language you’re using, nor does it include any of the distinctions you’re trying to draw. There is no “unless if there’s an ad revenue sharing system” exception to 230.
Aside from the details of 230, I would think long and hard about the unintended side effects of what you’re proposing. Attempts to control what Google and similar can and cannot moderate either results in Google having no moderation power at all (a disaster for the entire internet), or gives the government the power to decide what and what is not protected from Google’s moderation (which is contrary to the point of this exercise).
It's just a rephrasing of the theory that Google is acting like a publisher (information content provider) not a platform (interactive computer service), showing that interpretation is consistent with the text of the law. It's also consistent with the intentions of the lawmakers, as stated[1]:
> the Internet and other interactive computer services offer a forum for a true diversity of political discourse
> to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services
The law was not intended to protect a near-monopoly throwing its weight around in the political arena, or a duopoly blocking competition with their own apps.
And if that interpretation did somehow give the government the power to decide what is and what is not protected, that would still be an improvement over the present situation, because the government at least answers to the people and the Constitution, and right now nothing is protected.
1: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230
> It's just a rephrasing of the theory that Google is acting like a publisher (information content provider) not a platform (interactive computer service),
You are creating a test for platform vs. publisher that is not in the law. The law as linked does not even prohibit the censorship of political opinions, and in fact states that internet service providers may block constitutionally protected speech. It may be intended to free the Internet up for political discourse, but that doesn’t mean we get to totally ignore the text of the law and make up what we think it should be doing.
> The law was not intended to protect a near monopoly throwing its weight around
It wasn’t intended to do that, but that’s what it does. You don’t get to ignore the text of the law because you think it’s not acting the way you want it to. Legal systems work off the text of the laws, not what you think they should be doing.
Also, there are damn good reasons why I advise caution in these areas; unintended consequences are the norm and not the exception here. Section 230 wasn’t designed to protect monopolies, why do you think that trying to make Google “fair” wouldn’t have other unintended consequences?
Besides, if your problem with Google is that they’re a monopoly, why not use anti-monopoly laws? You can target Google specifically with those without the risk of putting all internet speech under the jurisdiction of the courts.
> And if that interpretation did somehow give the government the power to decide what is and what is not protected, that would still be an improvement
It might feel cathartic to use the power of government to force Google to do what you feel is expedient right now, but it’s something we’ll all come to regret. Understand that the nature of democracies is that people you disagree with will one day wield power, giving them the ability to control speech on the Internet is not a wise long term strategy.
> You are creating a test for platform vs. publisher that is not in the law.
There's a clear distinction between "publisher" (information content provider) and "platform" (interactive computer service) in the law. But the law provides no test for which category a particular entity falls into, so we have to provide this. No one is claiming that the proposed test is the current test, just that it's a good test, consistent with both the letter and the spirit of the law.
> That doesn’t mean you get to change what the law does on your own
Of course I don't. But the courts do, and when they do so, they consider the legislature's intent. If an interpretation is consistent with both the wording and intent, even if it isn't the original interpretation, it's possible to convince judges to adopt it.
> It might feel cathartic to use the power of government to force Google to do what you feel is expedient right now, but it’s something you’ll come to regret.
That sounds like fear mongering. If we can trust the US government to do anything, its to respect the first amendment. And if the day comes when we can no longer trust the US government to respect the first amendment, then this discussion is pointless, because at that point we'll have lost all freedoms.
But it's clear now that we cannot trust Google to respect freedom of speech. Of the two, in this narrow case, the government is more trustworthy than Google.
Section 230 provides a very clear definition of what an “Interactive Computer Service” is, and makes it very clear that someone who provides one cannot be considered to be the publisher, full stop.
> The term “interactive computer service” means any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides access to the Internet and such systems operated or services offered by libraries or educational institutions.
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
These two combined mean that you cannot find a way to consider Google to be a publisher under section 230. If they meet the definition of an Interactive Computer Service, then they cannot be a publisher under 230.
> But the courts do.
The courts have not weighed in on this aspect of Section 230, but they taken a very expansive view of the level of immunity that it grants. Particularly interesting here would be Blumenthal vs. Drudge, which granted AOL Section 230 immunity even though the content in question was written by AOL’s contractor, which is probably closer to the line than moderation.
Outside the courts, the general legal consensus is that Section 230 does not require impartiality or neutrality at all, based on both the text of the law and the congressional record around when it was passed.
> That sounds like fear mongering. If we can trust the US government to do anything, its to respect the first amendment.
Or, you know, it’s in line with the past few centuries of liberal democratic tradition to limit the power of the government in the area of free speech. The point of the 1st amendment is explicitly to get the government out of the business of deciding what is and is not acceptable speech. You would put it back into that process.
Also, you probably shouldn’t trust the government too openly here. Ever heard the phrase “shout fire in a crowded theater”? It comes from a supreme court case that jailed somebody for protesting WW1 (Schenck v. United States). That bad precedent stood for 50 years. Just saying.
Of course, there are so, so, so many practical problems with just saying “Google cannot block anything that’s protected speech.” Pornography is protected, violent videos are protected, hate speech is protected. Much of the internet becomes completely inoperable if you set the bar at protected speech; surely we’ve all seen enough poorly moderated forums to predict that.
It’s easy to imagine a scenario where Google can block “obscene” speech but not political speech. But where is that line? And who do you trust to have permanent, hegemonic power to decide what is and is not offensive for the entire Internet? Remember that we got into this mess partly because one group of people decided that another group of people’s political opinions were offensive; do not assume that they wouldn’t use the power of the government to suppress each other given the opportunity.
> Section 230 provides a very clear definition of what an “Interactive Computer Service” is, and makes it very clear that someone who provides one cannot be considered to be the publisher, full stop.
Note the word "another" in "another information content provider". The law plainly doesn't protect them for content they are responsible (even only in part) for creating, and by paying for some content and not other content, they're taking an active hand in choosing what content is created. In other words, they are, in part, responsible for the creation of that content.
> where is that line?
That's a question to be answered by democracy, not in a corporate board room.
And private control of the means of communication has never been unrestricted. Surely you're familiar with the regulations that once governed the television networks.
> If Google is paying for some content ... then they’re acting like a publisher.
There is case law to the contrary. AOL was granted 230 immunity when the issue at hand was about what a contractor of theirs said.
> That’s a question to be answered by democracy, not in a corporate board room
Or we could encourage a proliferation of choices on the internet, rather than handing whichever party is in power the right to suppress the speech of the other.
> Or we could encourage a proliferation of choices on the internet, rather than handing whichever party is in power the right to suppress the speech of the other.
I'm talking about preventing Google from exercising that power, not giving that power to the government. No one is proposing to repeal the first amendment.
I'm very much in favor of a proliferation of choices on the internet, but we don't really have that at the moment, and we need regulations that cover the situation we actually find ourselves in, not the ideal situation.
I’ve already made this point at least twice; getting the government involved in preventing Google from moderating content is giving the power to the government. Unless if you want to completely ban the ability of Google to moderate anything, then you are giving the power to someone to decide what is and is not protected from moderation on Google. This power to decide what is and is not immune from moderation would be hugely powerful, and would give the ability of the government to declare which ideological believes are and are not protected from moderation; which in effect would be hugely detrimental to the first amendment.
And even if you strip Google’s immunity from civil damages away, you are handing power over all internet speech over to the courts and anyone with enough time and money to use them. From a citizens perspective there is very little difference between censorship via the first or third branch of the government; both represent the erosion of the first amendment.
Similar regulations have existed in the past (common carrier and the fairness doctrine, for example) without giving the government the power to "declare which ideological believes are and are not protected from moderation".
The fairness doctrine was only constitutional because there were a limited number of channels (Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC), and it was impossible for anyone else to create one due to FCC regulations. I genuinely doubt that it would be constitutional today with cable television, let alone the internet.
I'm not proposing that we reestablish the fairness doctrine, just using it as an example of similar government regulation in the past that didn't have the disastrous effects you predicted.
But since you brought up the limited number of choices, I would like to mention that we find ourselves in that situation again today in the smartphone and online video markets, although for different reasons. And that's relevant because regulation is only necessary when the free market fails to provide the choices and freedoms we expect.
> Section 230 provides immunity to Google and similar for content posted by other users and services.
To be more clear, Google and other web publishers already enjoy immunity for content posted by other users and services. That is the default state of things under American law.
What section 230 does is preserve their immunity even if they exercise editorial discretion over some of the content that other users/services post. Without section 230, they would still have immunity. But they'd lose it as soon as they did any moderation at all of user-provided content.
This is not true. The default state of US law was that those who published without moderation were protected, and those that did moderate were not. Section 230 was created specifically because publishers who moderated user generated comments had been successfully sued for defamation [0].
Section 230 did not preserve any rights at all, it created entirely new ones. Companies were previously able to enjoy common carrier immunities, if they behaved like common carriers. Section 230 granted them those immunities without giving them the obligation to behave like common carriers.
It's hard to argue that the legislature in 1996 were imaging the future we would have in 2020 where the vast majority of content is controlled by such a small collection of companies, and where those companies often operate a lot like a cartel when it comes to moderation of that content. Section 230 is really the only example we have of common carrier immunities being granted to non-common carriers. The reason you don't see that more often is because it creates exactly this set of problems. It's clear that section 230 has had impact far beyond the scope of the 1996 legislation, the world has changed significantly since then, and those problems really should be addressed.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod....
Congress couldn’t possibly imagine that Google would exist when they passed Section 230, because Google probably wouldn’t exist without Section 230. Section 230 is generally credited with helping birth the modern Internet, without Section 230 the Internet would still look like it did in the 1980s; small and non-commercial.
None of the innovation that Google brought to the internet on its' way to becoming an internet giant relied on Section 230. The business of search and adds do not rely on Section 230 protections in any way.
Like any other regulation, it harms small businesses disproportionately to the costs it imposes on large ones. There are plenty of examples of regulations that are appropriate to apply to large businesses, but much less appropriate to apply to small ones. Luckily, this incredibly old problem has been solved many times over through the idea of having regulations apply to companies after they reach a certain size. There is little harm to society in allowing small content distributors full editorial control over their distribution channels. There is significant harm to society in allowing that same level of control to entities which control an enormous majority of modern content distribution.
This trope that "the internet wouldn't exist without Section 230" is just an overused excuse that people peddle out to distract from the fact that regardless of how important it was in 1996, as the internet has changed, this law is now responsible for an entirely new category of very serious problems, that really weren't envisioned at the time it was written. It also ignores the fact that these problems can be easily fixed without removing the elements of it which have been beneficial to the growth of online services.
> This is not true. The default state of US law was that those who published without moderation were protected, and those that did moderate were not. Section 230 was created specifically because publishers who moderated user generated comments had been successfully sued for defamation [0].
> Section 230 did not preserve any rights at all, it created entirely new ones. Companies were previously able to enjoy common carrier immunities, if they behaved like common carriers. Section 230 granted them those immunities without giving them the obligation to behave like common carriers.
It's kind of funny for you to open with "this is not true" and then go on to agree with everything I said. What part did you think wasn't true?
The bit where you claim that section 230 does not in fact create an entirely new set of legal protections for content distributors...
Just think about it for a split second.
I said that in the world without section 230, you start with immunity from responsibility for content provided by other parties, and you lose that immunity if you moderate those other parties' content.
Whereas, in the world with section 230, you start with immunity from responsibility for content provided by other parties, and you keep that immunity if you moderate those other parties' content.
On the other hand, you've provided the counterpoint that everything I said is absolutely correct, and I should be ashamed of putting out such ridiculous misinformation.
You are trying to disagree as strongly as you possibly can -- despite the fact that you agree with me in full. What's going on?
From what I gather this is largely addressed and the answer, it seems, is no [0,1]. (Disclaimer, IANAL and IANAUSC.)
[0]: https://abovethelaw.com/2019/06/explainer-how-letting-platfo...
[1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230 (Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material)
How is that a constitutional question?
The whole point of 230 was to answer that: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider".
Some courts had said that filtering makes the provider a publisher and liable for the content. Congress passed 230 to reverse that.
How would that be a constitutional challenge? If you're arguing for a different interpretation of the CDA that seems like a legal challenge and argument.
What's the constitutional argument against the current legislation of the CDA?
The problem is that they have to act across borders.
Examples:
In the EU you don't need to filter pornography the same way as in the US. In the US you don't need to filter personal information (eg individuals' faces) the same way as in the EU.
Or does Google need to ban insults of the Thai king?
Which legislation should apply? Already now China has split the global internet in a China and non-China part...
Is that a problem, or an opportunity? If we create an effective decentralized mechanic to act across jurisdictions, maybe we'd solve more than our immediate problem.
It's both. Sovereignty should not be taken lightly, nor do we really need yet another avenue for the big fish (read: US/China/Russia) to start throwing their weight around - whether it be through ""democracy"", troll farms, agitprop, etc. This may only start to become a better idea once we've proven we have an effective arsenal against these ideas.
Exactly. So how would you approach this?
If this problem is not addressed, the internet may well segregate along national boundaries (just as you describe).
> they have to act across borders.
They don’t have to, they choose to, in the name of growth.
If New York Times decided to operate in China too, deliver news in chinese about China, they would have the same problem.
What? The New York Times does deliver news in Chinese about China. Has done for quite a while.
Didn’t know that, thanks for chiming in. My point stands though.
Does it? Are you just assuming that, or did you find evidence of it?
Iirc NYT has been blocked in China for about 10 years, since that report about Wen Jiabao's family's money.
This seems very easy: when browsing the AppStore in Thailand, apps that insult the Thai king should be prohibited. Same with Facebook posts when accessed from Thailand, or YouTube videos etc. When accessing the same from the US, they MUST NOT be prohibited, because it would infringe on the rights of the creators.
Every nation should have the right to impose whatever restrictions it sees fit on companies wanting to distribute content to that nation.
Is it a pain to do this for the content distributor? Of course! But national sovereignty is far too important to be traded for ease of content distribution.
Of course, there is a problem (which some may consider a benefit) with the design of the Internet itself: there is no easy way to define what it means to distribute content to a particular country. But probably using national IP blocks is going to generally be good enough for many use cases.
> they MUST NOT be prohibited, because it would infringe on the rights of the creators.
However in reality the company acts conservitively and bans content that violates in Thailand for the US. "it's their platform". That's the same case as in the US. (See the article earlier talking about the CCP protest comments on youtube.)
Yes, that is what is happening because most states are not given enough power to impose their beliefs on entities like Google.
Even more in reality than your example, YouTube is censoring content the US or China or maybe Russia doesn't like everywhere, and it is not censoring content that Thailand or Uzbekistan or wherever else doesn't like even in those countries.
But if the US were to impose a no-censorship policy on YouTube (or at least a no-censorship-except-our-censorship policy), you would probably see some fragmentation to appease both the US and Chinese governments. And if a few dozen other countries did the same, with true force behind their decisions, you would either see YouTube retreating from those countries (perhaps opening the way for local alternatives), or many more YouTube front faces. Either way, there may be some advantages compared to the current system.
There is no fundamental law saying American multinationals need to run the entire world. I'd be comfortable with the idea that a company with as much data as Google shouldn't be allowed to operate a trans-national operation for military reasons. The Chinese acted prudently when they froze Google out of their domestic market.
Centralized walled gardens are going to face this no matter what policy they have. Too loose? They run afoul of laws and offend people. Too strict? They develop a reputation for censorship and offend people. There is no way they can win.
That's why everything has to go decentralized, encrypted, headless, and amorphous. The endpoint should be the end of platforms in favor of protocols and interfaces to those protocols.
Get to work.
> Centralized walled gardens are going to face this no matter what policy they have. Too loose? They run afoul of laws and offend people. Too strict? They develop a reputation for censorship and offend people. There is no way they can win.
Yes, they can win. The problem isn't that you're "too loose" or "too strict". The problem is that you have different users with different views of whether the same things is acceptable. You win by restricting your user base to people who agree on what should and shouldn't be allowed.
Join the Fediverse!
Nationalize FAANG?
This is my knee jerk reaction, but then I ask myself if I really want Trump (or Pelosi depending on your political persuasion) deciding how my search engine and social networks work.
Feeling a big "NOPE" on that one.
Customers need to make it unacceptable for FAANG to act this way... Good luck on that tho.
Unfortunately, they have been very good at slowly raising the temperature so the frog (read:us) doesn't jump out of the pot.
I don't see how putting Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon under the control of the US executive branch would solve the problems of accountability and them needing to deal with the laws of multiple nation states.
If one wants to subject these corporations to regulations, than it seems one should propose regulations. Putting them under the direct purview of a government does not magically make them start working in the best interest of the people (of which nation?). Nor does it mean that they are automatically accountable; see for example the NSA if you want examples predating the current administration.
Why not just free distribution and then enforce takedowns if something is deemed illegal after the fact? There’s no need for “users being in charge” or nationalization. These two parts especially don’t even seem at all necessary to your stated goals in terms of applied regulation. They would also be disastrous.
>If we treat Android, Window, Twitter, Facebook, as public spaces/goods
I feel like they're screaming at the top of their lungs asking you to not think of those things as public spaces. I am happy to try to oblige them.
They have become the new public space over time. I doubt they intended this, but this is the new world in 2020.
If you want to spread an idea now, you won't walk to your local town a square and start talking on a makeshift podium. You'll post a tweet or a facebook post, or make a reddit thread.
Yes. I understand. And Twitter, Facebook, et. al are asking us not to use them. So let's stop.
While they work as hard as possible to have communication monopolies in their respective spaces.
I agree with you though, the inherent problem is that they are private spaces and should act like it. That means developing the ability to interoperate with other private spaces (some sort of federated protocol would be required), and not having monopolies on distribution (being able to acquire iOS apps from 3rd party channels, for instance).
By extension, if anyone is considering legislation to enforce freedom of expression on social networks, I'd propose a different track—break up the largest of the social networks (namely Facebook at this point) and force them to interoperate.
That seems a lot more practical than forcing private companies to hold up public standards of free speech.
In (US) law there are two sets for rights and responsibilities: public (government) and private (individuals and organizations). But when it comes to responsibilities individuals can suffer consequences that organizations can't. And organizations can have power vastly greater than that of any individual. In some ways they should be subject to restrictions like governments, in others they shouldn't.
Really we need a third group. Corporations aren't individual people, and the legal simplification of modeling corporations as people is problematic. Unfortunately this probably requires a constitutional amendment for the US to change.
>>If we treat those platforms as private. Then we are playing in s/o's backyard. You are totally at their mercy.>>
I don't know what "s/o" means but assuming it means the operator of the platform, no, you are not at their mercy, they are at yours. Just go use another platform. If, in practical terms, there are no other platforms for the thing you want, then that's a different problem.
I think "someone"
>If we treat those platforms as private. Then we are playing in s/o's backyard. You are totally at their mercy. They have every right to kick you out if they don't like your face. It's their property. You are a guest.
Maybe this depends on the laws of a country. Also, IMHO either a company offers their services to everyone or to no one. There are, of course, exceptions that aren't really exceptions. Creative work in an "exception". For instance, French painter Monet was so popular that he could choose his customers.
> democratic footing (users are in charge)
"Users" is a tricky word here.
When you have democracy, and you say "users are in charge", what you really mean is "whatever group of users can get a majority is in charge".
What it perhaps sounds like you're saying, which isn't true under democracy but is desirable, is "individual users are in charge", i.e. you are in charge of your own data and content.
Putting users in charge does not solve censorship problems. The majority opinion - if it is in favour of censorship - will censor competing opinions.
Public ownership does not solve censorship. See: the CCP.
Effective policing does not solve censorship. The police will be tools of whoever and whatever is funding them.
The only way to combat censorship is through decentralised and distributed platforms that are made publicly immune to takedowns, censorship, and prosecution.
It astounds me that people are happy to accept that free speech in the US only applies in public spaces, while handing over control of the best places for spreading information to private companies. What's the point in that? "Free speech only applies to public space! Private companies can censor who they want! proceeds to make sure the information superhighway is entirely owned and controlled by private companies".
But public control doesn't work either. We've already seen government around the world censoring information in the "public interest".
Decentralisation, and distributism are the only ways.
CCP is not public ownership. CCP is a minority political party that subjugates the public through violence.
It is a bit of both. Sure, 'public' becomes a bit tenious (Perhaps 'government' is a better descriptor?), but still applies. Other truly communist nations have had similar issues with despotism however. And as is parroted so often, a government is where the state has a monopoly on violence. The trick is to limit the rights and abilities of the state to do so without just cause while allowing minority opinions to flurish.
Blockchain-based Facebook when?
A platform isn't public or private. It's a platform. You can use it any way you want. But if it's not your platform, you don't get to make the rules of how it can be used or how it works.
I don't think people realize how ridiculous they sound when they reach this far just to get Google to do whatever the user wants with Google's service. It's a very millennial/zoomer/i-only-know-life-since-Google-has-existed point of view. It implies that people don't think they can fairly live a human existence without using Google (which is the truly disturbing thing about all this).
I mean, jesus. Nobody has forced you to use any of Google's services, you literally do not need to use any of their services at all. And there are alternate service providers. We didn't even go this far with Ma Bell, an actual monopoly.
If this is about "boo hoo I can't make money off of their platform", why not the same complaint about literally any other business? It's a much more reasonable thing to fight for, say, right to repair, than right-to-make-an-app-that-will-be-published-no-matter-what-by-Google.
At the moment, the best comparison I can come up with is food trucks. Say you own a giant empty lot. You offer it to food trucks to come and sell their food in your lot. It's a big success. You make money, the food trucks make money. Then one day, you want to kick out a food truck, for whatever reason. And they say, this is so unfair. We should form a government committee to manage this parking lot because the owner of the lot won't let me sell hotdogs here anymore. Even though they could just, you know, do what they do somewhere else, and still make basically the same living.
The solution to this as I see this is that these platforms allow everything. Only block illegal (local law) content and spam. Provide users with powerful blocking/filtering tools. The only influence they can have on content is monetization/advertising. They are free to be preferential with who they wish to monetize. Thats the best compromise I can think off.
I use Podcast Addict every day, I would even say that is my most used app on android. I work listening to podcasts and PA is the best app for those who like highly customizable software. You can change almost everything.
Its sad that we are in a situation where a company can dictate what we can install on our computers/smartphones. I know we can sideload apps on android, but the majority of users doesn't care about this and just give away its freedom to really own the device in exchange for the easiest way to operate it. And every day we walk towards lesser control of our property and more dependency of those companies.
Another problem is that developers can, without notice, be locked out of their incomes for whatever reason without ways to properly appeal. Those who can, we should consider supporting the developer Xavier Guillemane on Patreon, at least until this situation gets resolved. The amount of work he put on the app, its probably his main source of income and I wouldn't like if he need to abandon the app development due to this. The lowest tier is just $1.
> dictate what we can install on our computers/smartphones
Can they though? Android does not make it difficult at all to install apps through stores other than their own Play Store. A quick internet search reveals that there are at least a dozen other options for users to download apps to Android phones.
I agree that a devices OS should allow alternative means to install apps, but Android has clearly done this.
I agree with you on that, Android is far less hostile to installing software outside of the store than iOS.
The problem is, if the developer wants its software to reach the wide audience of the platform, its a obvious choice for him to use what the users perceive as the "official way" of installing software. Sure, you can offer both ways, but if your app is missing from the official store, the majority of users won't even know it exists.
IMHO we, as users and developers, have our share of the blame for problems like this one, and we should be vigilant so Android doesn't become like iOS.
The other side of this is that app developers are screwed when it comes to compensation. Providing the ability to sideload doesn't mean anything if developers can't be compensated and can't continue developing their app (as I don't expect them to if they aren't in any way rewarded for it financially).
Alternative stores don't have the same access as play store. They can't have auto-updates.
In most of these stories featuring Google abusing their power to remove apps, it's usually a matter of some automated tool gone wrong and the problem is solved a couple of days later. But this time it's different, they are actually asking developers to censor themselves if they are not affiliated with a gov.
What makes you think this is something other than another (awful) high profile case of automation gone wrong?
Because their action seems consistent with their stated intention of banning all non-official speech on Covid-19?
It could still be reversed if they feel public opinion swings the other way. That wouldn't mean it's automation gone wrong.
It may be automated based on frequency of reports, but either way this is unlikely to be company policy. The people who make these decisions are relatively low-level employees following a company guidebook. The guidebook says it has to go? It has to go. The employee doesn't want to get fired.
I doubt it'll stick.
>...but either way this is unlikely to be company policy
Perhaps you haven't seen the article because it's behind an Apple News link. There's a screenshot of a message stating company policy as follows:
"Pursuant to Section 8.3 of the Developer Agreement and the Enforcement policy, apps referencing Covid-19, or related terms, in any form will only be approved for distribution on Google Play if they are published, commissioned or authorized by official government entities or public health organizations"
That's not what I meant. I mean, it's unlikely that someone high up in the company decided to snipe this app. It's probably a low-level employee following the formal rulebook a little too much to the letter.
We’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. With new diseases or any new phenomena knowledge changes frequently. Oftentimes official organs are lagging and independent voices are at the forefront and have the freshest information.
Unfortunately both of the above can have counter agenda (could have good intentions such as calming hoarding), even worse is that you can have kooks, active disinformation, lulz, etc. There is no good answer to this.
I think our traditional answer was good enough. Trust the people to weigh a wide range of information and opinions. Delegate more detailed analysis and decision making to political representatives and independent institutions.
It's not like there wasn't any anti-scientific rubbish, hate speech and manipulation in book shops, newspapers and on TV. Entire countries used to be run by media barons (literally or effectively).
Regarding Covid specifically, I find it pretty ironic that free speech should be restricted to government officials by an oligopoly of US corporations while the head of the US government routinely spreads anti-scientific disinformation on that very subject (and on others).
I agree. Not only the US but even the WHO is very susceptible to manipulation (it’s not human transmissible, then yes it is, masks don’t work, then yes they do). We also see politics dictate policy (viz Taiwan). Then Gates alarms almost everyone with his “disease free certificates”.
> >...but either way this is unlikely to be company policy
> Perhaps you haven't seen the article because it's behind an Apple News link. There's a screenshot of a message stating company policy as follows:
> "Pursuant to Section 8.3 of the Developer Agreement and the Enforcement policy, apps referencing Covid-19, or related terms, in any form will only be approved for distribution on Google Play if they are published, commissioned or authorized by official government entities or public health organizations"
How does their own browser not run afoul of this policy?
Because policies are written and interpreted by humans that have the common sense to understand that there is no connection between the browser app and the content it displays.
This entire thread is a discussion about Google's automatic tool flagging a podcast browser erroneously. If Google's response was to uphold the suspension then there would be an actual story, but they won't, and so it isn't.
Podcast Addict builds an index of podcasts that it makes available to users whereas Chrome does not influence in any way what content users may want to view.
But your question is of course very apt when it comes to the Google Search app or Google's own podcast app.
There used to be this idea (a good idea in my view) that building a search index is a neutral activity that does not come with any editorial responsibility for the content.
Google used to fight for that idea but unfortunately lawmakers (and I think the majority of the population) have very firmly taken the opposite view.
I think that's what's ultimately at the core of this defensive "when in doubt, ban it!" attitude that was built into automatic content filtering tools and hammered into the heads of reviewers.
There are still gaps - the most glaring one being Google Search - but I think Google has largely given up that struggle in favour of avoiding billions in fines
Except for the Covid-19 podcast on the Google podcast app.
The tool is clearly implementing the policy as described. It's just a policy that's stupid, arrogant and naive.
Surely Google's automated tools wouldn't automatically suspend an app that has 5 stars and over 500,000 reviews
.... surely
There have been too many cases of a popular app being bought by scammers and repurposed. They can't exempt an app from being suspended just because it's popular.
Exempting it from automatic suspension is not exempting it from suspension.
I would rather apps be automatically suspended and the install marked as potentially dangerous than have my device goatse'd to a malicious developer for any amount of time.
That can be accommodated. Automatic suspension that lasts 20-30 minutes while someone on the team looks into the case and makes a human judgement.
But a full suspension, on a popular app, without rapid human review? That shouldn't happen.
Also, this wasn't up to the "install marked as dangerous" level. They just prevented new installs. In a situation like that, there's no need to act instantly.
That kind "popularity content" policy will never work because because then scammers will just buy apps with good reputation. This describes the entire browser extension marketplace. Any extension with a good reputation and a broad permission set will sell for a good bit of money.
That sounds like a spot where a human can step in?
> and the problem is solved a couple of days later.
If the developer is lucky enough to hit the front page of HN.
This isn't as weird as it seems in this new weird world. The "most official" support channel for Spotify is their Twitter handle while their email form is the secondary option.
Letting internet outrage drive the support queue is oddly pragmatic.
It's not pragmatic, its just the bare minimum. It turns out that if you want good support you have to scale your support to the number of users.
Meh. If I left an automation roaming the streets and it ate someone’s kid I would get in trouble.
If google’s automations are broken and they harm the world then they need to be responsible and fix them or replace them with people.
But automating something that might eat a kid, versus inadvertently blocking an app access very very different. This why no one is tackling a nanny bot --- repercussions.
Agreed on the last part.
Ok maybe an automation that blocked a parking lot is a better analogy.
Uber killed Elaine Herzberg and didn't get in trouble.
Automated jurisprudence and adjudication seems to be suboptimal.
Isn't the elimination of human judgement one reason we all hate bureaucracies?
This "Not approved by Government or Public Health Organizations" rule seems to apply to all the indie apps except for the apps built by mega corps
- Twitter app asks users to follow Covid-19 related news as the first item in their home screen after login (and has a separate tab for news related to Covid-19 in Search screen).
- Reddit official app asks users to subscribe to /r/Coronavirus (that subreddit is not moderated by any government).
- Quora android app has a banner at the top that is similar (follow Coronavirus Space - all the content in that topic seems to be generated by users).
- YouTube app currently has a featured video related to Covid on my feed from one of their official Spotlight channels.
I'm sure Facebook has something similar to follow news related to Covid.
So there's no consistency of banning non-official speech on Covid-19
Also this is not the first time it happened. Same thing happened to
- A meme generator app because one of the memes contained word Corona (https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/fn0wzl/app_with...).
- An RSS reader app for showing news related to Covid (https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/ggb3s7/a_week_s...)
- A self improvement app that curates articles (https://reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/gem317/our_app_was_...)
And in all of these examples, app seems to be restored after talking to someone at Google. Shouldn't that be the first thing done by the Google play team (before suspending the app) instead of dev losing all the installs and revenue for the time the app is suspended?
None of the app stores are fair. Apple charges amazon 2x less for any subscriptions done through the app store. They all reject many indie apps for protecting privacy or security but then all the big apps are allowed to do it. Their apps can access system APIs that are off limit to others.
Some people in the comment section only recently feeling the censorship done by china affecting them but imagine other non-US countries that get censored by American companies all the time.
This is like Google banning the YouTube app from the play store for having videos about covid that aren't from government sources. Insane stuff.
Isn't it even worse? Does the app hosts the podcast or merely references them / plays them? More like banning a browser from the store as the browser may be used to display inapropriate content.
I see your intent is an analogy but that’s exactly what they did in Jan-Mar timeframe. They suspended people for acknowledging the virus’ existence. Just CCP style.
Are you sure? I thought they were just demonetizing them (which is still bad, but less bad)
That’s an interesting example because YouTube are also removing COVID-19 content from some disreputable sources.
To be clear: I’m not defending Google, I also don’t agree with the podcast takedown.
I found this very quickly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgln8rjuIMU&feature=share
I didn't say their algorithm was flawless, just that they are removing content.
Here's a few citations:
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52388586
https://fee.org/articles/youtube-to-ban-content-that-contrad...
https://www.theblaze.com/news/youtube-will-remove-any-corona...
https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/youtube-ramps-up-actio...
These haven't been cherry picked, they're the top 4 results on a DDG search.
Your example only demonstrates that you don't understand the difficulty in censoring content on social platforms as enormous as YouTube; not that Google don't have a policy that prohibits such content.
The one I linked is from a Swedish conspiracy theory channel with 16k subscribers and it has been up for 2 months, gotten 40k views (huge for Swedish language content) and does not try to hide itself at all ("WakeUpGlobe SE" and uses "corona" in the title). It would be trivial for a human to find this.
You can't blanket ban terms otherwise you'd end up accidentally banning far more false positives than a few podcast apps. For example "corona" is a pretty broad term -- it would be like banning Nazi content but using the word "German" from "National Socialist German Workers' Party" as your identifier then wondering why half the German language videos disappear.
> It would be trivial for a human to find this.
Someone literate in Swedish maybe (to gather the context of those key words) but it isn't humans which do this.
Google are big into automation to the extent that they have machines doing their review. You might consider that wrong but then you have to ask yourself how many humans would it take to moderate a platform as large as YouTube. I bet you that whatever number you come up wouldn't be enough and someone else would say "I found another video that was trivial to find, Google don't hire enough platform moderators!"
Plus it's a pretty horrible job being a professional moderator and spending your whole day reviewing the dregs of society. I've read reports where people who've done it had said it's had a very real negative impact on their mental health.
As I said earlier, fixing problems like this at scale is insanely hard. It's one of those things that might seem easy at a superficial level but it's fraught with errors and you can guarantee that whatever decision the moderator makes (be that human or algorithm) someone will be unhappy and claim it's not fair.
But they're not asking the podcast hosts to remove the content. They're penalizing a podcast player app, which has no ability to remove bad content.
Again, I didn’t say I agree with the apps removal, just that Google we’re at least being internally consistent.
With regards to the app removal, do we know it is a Google management decision and not the work of an overzealous app reviewer or an algorithm (the latter being the way Google usually operate)?
The reason I talk about internal consistency is because it is hard getting the right balance between removing stuff that should be vs stuff that shouldn’t and that problem is only magnified when when doing so at scale. So if this were a management then I totally understand the pitchforks but if it’s a false positive an in algorithm then hopefully Google will rectify and we can all go back to moaning about Electron or whatever the next meme is.
I disagree that they are being consistent. An almost-equivalent move would be suspending the entire YouTube app, and making a new entry in the Play Store after they have removed all offending content. But at least YouTube has some ability to remove content, so that would actually make more sense than suspending Podcast Addict which plays third-party-hosted media.
They’re suspending accounts on YouTube and pulling videos, just like they’re doing with apps on their Play Store. They can’t moderate the podcasts posted but they can moderate the apps and videos posted. So of course it’s internally consistent.
The real question is whether it should be consistently upheld without exceptions and the answer to that is obviously “no” because some apps are hubs to user curated content like that podcast app is.
As for your comment about them suspending their entire YouTube app, you talk as if this was a management exec decision rather than rouge judgement that will inevitably get overturned.
Google isn’t a single entity. It’s a collection of people and algorithms all making their own judgements based on Google’s policies. Sometimes they miss stuff they should moderate and sometimes they get overzealous and remove content they shouldn’t. There is such a large grey area and scope for personal judgement that you have to expect some unpopular verdicts from time to time. It’s shit but no two situations are identical so it’s a problem that’s impossible to avoid. The real tell is whether Google reverse the decision once the complaint gets escalated.
Google's rules only apply to their competitors in the attention economy.
> Insane stuff
Google is actually applying the same standard in this case (or at least attempting to). They're also fighting conspiracy theories on YouTube.
It's a great pity all the factual comments about YouTube's COVID-19 video removal policy (or "censorship" depending on your viewpoint) are being down voted while all the anti-Google rhetoric is floating above it.
I get it's cool to hate Google these days and I'm not saying I agree with the removal of the podcast app, however the removal of that app is consistent with how Google have been maintaining some of their other platforms too. This isn't a theoretical point either, it's been well documented in the news and talked to death on here too. So regardless of my opinion of Google (and to be clear: I'm not fan either) I still can't help feeling that all the "Google are hypocrites" remarks being made are completely ignorant of the fact that Google are actually removing content on YouTube as well.
Here's a bunch of citations that proves this and the GP comments are actually correct despite the down votes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23220864
It's a great pity that you treat legitimate disagreement as mindless anger.
"They are removing content on youtube." is a true factual statement.
"They are applying the same standard." is not.
The motivation may be the same, but the types of removal are very different. As long as their own podcasting app is up in its current form, there is a very good argument that they're not being consistent.
> It's a great pity that you treat legitimate disagreement as mindless anger.
I’m not talking about disagreement of these posts (there’s nothing to disagree, the comments were factually accurate), I’m talking about the comments where people say stuff like “Google's rules only apply to their competitors“, which clearly isn’t true (as I’ve proven).
I also don’t agree with you exaggerating my comments to claim I was accusing people of being mindless and agree when I said no such thing.
> The motivation may be the same, but the types of removal are very different. As long as their own podcasting app is up in its current form, there is a very good argument that they're not being consistent.
When splitting hairs there’s a risk you sub-divide the problem so finely that you then can argue nothing is equivalent and I think that’s what’s happening here.
There’s a saying that goes something like “don’t attributed malice to acts of incompetence” which applies here. People are quick to jump on the offensive when it’s clearly a policy that Google follow on their other platforms and it might well be a decision that is overturned upon review.
I explain this point more eloquently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23222167
I don't think it's splitting hairs. Banning video channels and banning apps are very different things. Consistency would ban both apps and any normal web browser, or would have never gone near banning this one.
The equivalent to the youtube bans is when they ban apps that are actually about covid-19. Not apps with internet search.
> I’m not talking about disagreement of these posts (there’s nothing to disagree, the comments were factually accurate), I’m talking about the comments where people say stuff like “Google's rules only apply to their competitors“, which clearly isn’t true (as I’ve proven).
No, the exact opposite of that. Because I was replying to the part of your post that says "It's a great pity all the factual comments about YouTube's COVID-19 video removal policy (or "censorship" depending on your viewpoint) are being down voted"
That is about disagreement, and is not about comments where people say stuff like “Google's rules only apply to their competitors“.
> I also don’t agree with you exaggerating my comments to claim I was accusing people of being mindless and agree when I said no such thing.
You said "factual comments are being down voted" in favor of "anti-Google rhetoric". That's either people being mindless or people being malicious. Maybe I shouldn't have used the word "anger", but I don't think "mindless" is exaggerating what you said at all. You painted the situation as having no legitimate reason to downvote those comments.
I don’t think there is a legitimate reason and I’ve cited how those comments were factually accurate. You might disagree with the comparison but I don’t think we are likely to see eye to on that, which is fine. :)
However I still object to you twisting my words to something far more sinister then they’re clearly intended. That’s simply not good debating.
There were comments with facts, but whether they supported the point being made was arguable. If the facts are irrelevant, it's not a great pity to see a downvote.
And yeah, that disagreement is fine.
But you need to understand that I am not trying to twist your words at all. I see those two things as synonyms. No twisting is intended. And for you to say "far more sinister then they’re clearly intended" sounds like an accusation of deliberate malicious behavior, not even me making a mistake, and I don't appreciate that.
“Disagree” and “hate” are not synonyms. They’re related terms but they don’t mean the same thing and are intended to express different extremes of sentiment.
“Deliberate” and “malicious” is another example of related but terms that are not synonyms.
Whereas “mindless” was entirely fabricated by you.
You can’t just swap out words for more emotive terms and assume that was the writers original intent. Especially when you then go on to use those new, more highly charged words, as part of your complaint against the original comment.
I can also see for your post history ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229973) that you don’t like it when you feel misquoted yourself, so why do the same to others?
> “Disagree” and “hate” are not synonyms.
My post was only talking about disagreement as expressed by downvoting. I was not using disagreement as a synonym for hate.
> “Deliberate” and “malicious” is another example of related but terms that are not synonyms.
I wasn't saying they were. I feel like you're greatly misunderstanding my posts or something.
> Whereas “mindless” was entirely fabricated by you.
So what motivation were you implying, when you talked about it being a "great pity that all the factual comments" about the policy were being downvoted?
I wasn't swapping out your own words for other words. You never explicitly said what the motivation was, so I did my best to convert that into words. You're telling me I did that wrong, fine, but it wasn't on purpose. You tell me what words I should use there, to talk about the motivation of those downvoters.
> I can also see for your post history ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229973) that you don’t like it when you feel misquoted yourself, so why do the same to others?
What a weird flex. They weren't quoting me at all.
"They're also fighting conspiracy theories on YouTube"
It's too bad google is so insanely incompetent that there are more every day instead of less. It's enough to make you think that they aren't staggeringly incompetent, have talented engineers, and aren't trying to fight conspiracy theory videos that are among the stickiest content on their sites.
It's an insanely hard problem to solve at the scale YouTube operate on. Your comment is equivalent to those armchair critics that moan about national sports teams as if they are their kids Sunday league.
They're certainly eager to push ads for conspiracy theory websites at me, even though I've never watched those sorts of videos.
How is it that this live feed is allowed?
"Coronavirus Live Map and realtime counter - Latest worldwide COVID-19 stats and figures." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRy5_KpPxyM
And there're tons more when you search "covid 19 stats" in YT
And meanwhile you can use Google to search for "covid19 podcast" and you will get podcast recommendations from non-government sources. This is insane.
The object of censorship is silencing dissent.
A million clueless searches vs a few informed dissenting voices, which is more troubling for authoritarian regimes?
You can search all you want, but can you share what you have learned?
Welcome to our "new normal".
Sure, here's me sharing a page I got to from a Google Search, hosted by Google: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5jYXN0Zml...
On it you can listen to a podcast about Covid 19 from a media company that is not a government agency or health organisation.
I just downloaded google podcast app. Did a search for corona, there are a bunch of results. Google is not a government entity, neither are all the podcasts I could find using it. I hope they will ban their own podcast app pretty soon.
Make sure you flag Google Podcasts as inappropriate, giving the references to coronavirus as the reason.
Link for convenience: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/cont...
The package name is 'com.google.android.apps.podcasts'
And leave a 1-star review stating the reason.
This is my first comment in HN. This is the best productive podcast app ever. The developer is also so helpful with any kind of bugs I reported. I hope this is resolved quickly.
I am impressed you remember your password from that long ago.
Pretty sure password managers existed four years ago.
And if you have forgot your password but filled the email field, you can reset it with https://news.ycombinator.com/forgot
This made me wonder how long since I had last logged into HN.
About that long, though I had commented before that.
I'm still using BeyondPod. Development is stale and problems start appearing. It has one-two features really unique that I miss with other apps. First and foremost "Smart Playlists"
People lurk and upvote, you know
Much agreed - I've been using it daily for years
Podcast Addict shouldn't be banned for non-approved Covid content.
When I tested the version of Podcast Addict with ads, it started reloading ads in the background and going through my battery and data allowance. The developer wasn't able to figure out and fix the problem. Just did a quick search and the last time someone wrote about this problem is a year ago (on reddit). Maybe it is fixed now? I would be okay with an app being banned for such bug, btw. It's app bugs like this that cause the ever stricter background service restrictions on Android (until it's like iOS and just not possible anymore).
(googler, opinions are my own).
Looks like the appeal was accepted[0]. As well, Google's SVP of Android/Chrome/ChromeOS/PlayStore apologized to the Podcast Addict team[1].
[0] https://twitter.com/PodcastAddict/status/1262541050817605632
[1] https://twitter.com/PodcastAddict/status/1262562502417641473
What action is being taken to prevent similar foolishness in the future?
Or is Google leaving their process unchanged in the hope that the next thing to be unreasonably suppressed will evoke less outrage?
It's hard to take an action. Google cares about recall right now to avoid liability. In theory it could be easily solved by lowering the threshold which will certainly improve precision. But you know what that will also do? It will lower recall which will just open Google up to litigation or regulation. See what regulation did to YouTube. It's the same reason YouTube has such a weird copyright strike process. Google is not secretly conspiring against YouTube creators like the creators would like you to believe.
I think a socially good deed would be to take the original tweet https://twitter.com/PodcastAddict/status/1261671685477941253... and respond to it tweeting @FTC , @kenpaxtontx (who is behind the antimonopoly case). Google will reinstate the app soon, but it should help building the antimonopoly case against this evil machine.
Good idea. Done.
Somewhat on topic: a reply to that tweet simply had the captain kirk facepalm gif, and twitter warned me that it may contain sensitive content. Social media is creating a milquetoast society.
I've never lived in China but this immediately sounds like my (naive) idea of what it must be like: you're only allowed to consume what the government has approved.
I think this is setting a dangerous precedence.
Except in this case it's not the government, but private corporations taking some kind of political stance.
Google in particular has been very "active," not to forget also: https://www.businessinsider.com/youtube-will-ban-anything-ag... ("video that 'goes against' WHO guidance on the pandemic will be blocked")
There is a lot of pressure on the large tech companies to stop spreading misinformation. This is one of their measures.
So? That pressure is unconstitutional in the US and should be ignored completely and resisted utterly.
How is it unconstitutional? Google/Youtube is not a neutral carrier and can pick what gets broadcasted - just like Fox or CNN.
For the record: as a paying Podcast Addict user, I think this is a shitty action by Google. I just don't see how it is unconstitutional.
NB. I hope something good comes out of this, like more people discovering and using third party app stores, or being able to run apps on android auto even if google hasn't approved such apps (hello TomTom).
The pressure from the government is unconstitutional.
The govt asking Google to help keep the spread of misinformation down is totally different than the govt forcing Google to do so and arresting anyone that posts anything contrary to the official position.
Freedom of speech doesn't really care if information is correct or incorrect.
So the government-approved information is OK but other information is "misinformation"?
Finding excuses for big tech does not help.
If only they would suppress disinformation issued by governmental sources, I wouldn't be so troubled by this.
> private corporations taking some kind of political stance.
It's not a political stance, it's a moderation action.
Google, Facebook, etc. are just bad moderators of their platforms.
Selective enforcement of moderations policies is bad moderation. Implementing automated moderation without proper quality control is bad moderation. Implementing automated moderation without proper appeal processes is bad moderation.
The moderation policy is insane, but I think how moderation is done is even more insane.
Try posting something either of those companies care about (I don't mean copyrighted stuff that can be automated) and see how fast it gets taken down.
Given that there is selective attention given to different political subjects it is by definition a political stance.
What is a government but a "corporation" that owns land and takes a political stance? I find Google to be virtually indistinguishable from government besides that it doesn't have a constitution. Even worse is that they have contracts with the US and various governments, making them a political toady.
Except this time it's a company. I've always wondered why people in the 70s were worried about 'technocracy' and I dismissed it as a bit of a conspiracy thing. I'm not so sure now.
gated institutional narrative
I've been getting away from apps installed from the play store over the years. This is one of the 2 remaining apps I have that I paid for. This is appalling behavior my Google. I can't wait until I can make a real Linux based phone my daily driver.
> I can't wait until I can make a real Linux based phone my daily driver.
Alas, all the competitors are now moribund, and much of the market couldn't give two hoots about privacy issues.
What do you mean? Pinephone is alive and well and you can get your own Linux "toy" for $150. Can't say much about Librem 5, but afaik they are also shipping.
You can also get officially supported Sailfish OS on a couple Xperia devices:
https://jolla.com/sailfishx/
Perfectly suitable for daily use, typing from such a device just now. :) IIRC there is a community port for PinePhone as well.
Sailfish is pretty great and I wish them all the best, I did find myself in need of a few features while using it, one thing being their web browsers lack of usb access for devices like yubikeys: https://together.jolla.com/question/213458/usb-2fa-support-i...
couldn't edit, but want to add that there are now more alternatives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7LFPw9Z2aM
From what I can read, the use of Sailfish is only allowed in certain EU countries. Why is that? Their site does not address this.
I'm just guessing but one reason could be to avoid having to support foreign payment, tax and possibly warranty regimes (Jolla, the company behind Sailfish OS, is based in Finland).
Also they might want to avoid doing business in countries that support software patents and are over litigious over that (eq. USA).
But this limitation is pretty much artificial - the only thing you need to do from the EU is buying the image. This can be achieved via an EU based VPN (reportedly the built in VPN in Opera works) and AFAIK any mainstream payment card will work (does not have to be from an EU country).
Once you got the license and installation image, there are no real EU specific limitations. I have used Sailfish OS twice while on a trip in Japan and all worked just fine - repo access, etc. Also from the download statistics from OpenRepos (a community package repository for Sailfish OS), you can see there is a lot of users from countries that are not officially supported:
https://openrepos.net/statistics/global
How is Whatsapp support? Phone without WhatsApp is currently nogo here.
No idea, haven't touched WhatsApp and don't intend to. :)
That said, the SW will of course lag behind commercial offerings. Just see how long it took for desktop Linux to catch up to the major players. But open source system gives me the freedom to turn it inside-out, get rid of things I don't want (even systemd if I felt really strongly about it), repair what I want - be the owner of by phone and not just a cow to be milked for rent. Nah, I can live without WhatsApp. Or I can get a secondary cheap Android phone for such apps.
Devices are cheap. If you can't live without certain proprietary apps, carry two phones. If you don't want to do tethering for battery reasons, a second cell plan is under $10/mo.
I would love this as well (Linux phone). Sadly not likely to happen on wider scale and nice hardware.
This would be really nice, yes. Then we could just use the same tools we configure our computers with on our phones too.
Here you go:
https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
and
https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/
I had seen them and perhaps it's time to give them a go. Are you (or anyone else) using it, and how is it?
I'm using a Pinephone for a few months now. Not as my main Phone. The hardware is not great(150$) but the software is getting better each week. It's so much fun to play around with. And I'm going to buy the next hardware generation without thinking twice.
Comments from someone who has them both: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23195007
I do not see why it cannot happen. Everything starts from a small number of dedicated users.
> I can't wait until I can make a real Linux based phone my daily driver.
They will be too busy arguing about systemd or similar rather than working on the UX so it will never happen. The Linux world seems to strive for perfection (despite everyone's idea of perfection being different) when they barely have the resources to do even a "good enough" solution.
Um .. PinePhone? PostmarketOS? Plasma Mobile? These things exist now.
One of the few paid apps I use extensively. Completely ridiculous given that their own damn podcast app shows everyone the same podcasts.
Not to mention that you can literally post an RSS feed into pretty much every podcast app, it's an open ecosystem. Jesus.
Can Google actually put people with some degree of sensibliity in charge of these decisions? This reminds me of Amazon deleting 1984 from people's Kindles.
This is once again an example for how freedom of speech is becoming more and more controlled by tech companies.
I'm a little worried about this phenomenon. Google is not constructed by journalists. Freedom of speech might not be first priority for Google.
Just think about how extremely dystopian it is, to punish someone for relaying information that is not approved by the government.
The slope is getting slippier every day.
Someone on HN suggested an amendment to the rule that private companies are not obliged to follow any freedom of speech principles when they grow to a size where they are closer to a carrier than a service. I think it's time to seriously consider something like that.
Sweden and herd immunity is official government source? Also this is the only country where scientists are in 100% control, politicians don't make these shots what so ever, this is their policy for this pandemic. So all these anti lockdown folks can always have that as an official government source and possibly also scientific because of the way they set it up there. Of course at least in Europe all the countries are moving the same direction anyway.
Sweden is 7th in confirmed cases per capita. I'm not sure you can point to them as a success story.
Or "public health organizations". Given how much the WHO lied to everyone to protect PRC, continues to do it and bullied the country that handle the crisis the best (Taiwan) this is particularly ridiculous, in addition to being indeed distopic. Or maybe Google want us to drink bleach, as this a solution approved by POTUS? Not wearing masks like the French government said? If anything governmental sources should be as heavily fact checked as any others.
Imagine allowing someone to relay information that causes the decimation of the human population. Just wanted to give an idea of what the other side of the argument looks like.
You think journalists would be any better?
Wow, obviously an oversight. Pretty sure Google does not want search tools to be responsible for the content of the results they surface...
To some extent they already are. Whether it’s the EUs “Right to be Forgotten” or US DMCA takedown notices, Google are responsible for removing listings.
To be clear: I also don’t agree with the podcast takedown.
> Wow, obviously an oversight.
this is google's mantra these days. do they do anything well anymore?
I'm sure Google will suspend their own podcast app too?
> Searching for “coronavirus”or “COVID-19” in Google Podcasts returns podcasts from mainstream media outlets that aren’t endorsed by government entities or public health organizations.
It's a great podcast app which gives the user a ton of freedom and tweaking possibilities, but it's also set and forget.
If this is the first time you hear about it, the safest place to obtain it is the author's Google Drive: https://twitter.com/PodcastAddict/status/1262047866614247425
I've seen so many of these posts saying, Google removes this or that from the store. But until now I did not realize how criminal this is. I know the Dev. Super guy, addresses help questions from thousands of users personally all without the jaded condescending that many maintainers effuse.
Podcast Addict is my favorite podcast app. I have been using it with great satisfaction for years. I hope that gets sorted out quickly.
Another aspect that I don't quite understand: The story claims that Google asks for the app to be published as a new download. And indeed the provided screenshot includes this request (in pretty small print). This makes no sense to me. Why wouldn't Google be satisfied by just changing the existing app? Any ideas what the reason might be?
If you are an end user who would like to avoid getting caught in this situation, you might want to switch to using F-Droid [0] as your primary source of Android software. The selection is more limited, but because everything is open source and distributed outside of Google's walled garden, you can be sure that it won't be arbitrarily removed because of the whims of corporate bureaucracy.
I write this not as a dogmatic free software proponent, either; I have bought apps on the Play Store in the past and would consider doing so if the experience weren't so poor. Dealing with the Play Store has gotten so frustrating (not just due to this issue, but also due to the difficulty of filtering out shovelware and spyware) that I only reach for it as a last resort now.
[0] https://f-droid.org/
How does f-droid police "shovelware and spyware"? Or just outright malware? Surely they will remove it? In which case your favourite app might be "arbitrarily removed"?
They try to scan for them, and have reporting options. Its open source apps only, so first, if its removed, then arguments can be made using the full source code as evidence one way or another. And you can always grab the code for your favorite app and build it yourself.
https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Anti-Features/
Open source doesn't change anything here. Bytecode has a extremely tight relationship with source so even if none of the code is open you can still strongly point to specific pieces of code that cause problems. The core issue with detailed explanations of the malicious behavior that trips over automated detection is that it enables malware authors to more easily hide malicious behavior.
F-Droid only carries FOSS. Technically, that wouldn't prohibit a malware vendor from getting their app into the catalog, but like the processes for package repositories for desktop distros, there's a lot of cultural, social, and procedural baggage associated with being the kind of project that gets distributed through those channels. Who's going to go through the effort? The whole point of shovelware is that it's a low-effort process.
Any app distribution platform carries with it a risk of hosting user-hostile software, so it is certainly not immune. Fortunately there are fewer incentives for trying to sneak such software into F-Droid which results in fewer (if any) straight up lies intended to trick users into buying misleading software or exposing their data for the sake of ad revenue.
This is of course the same issue we all face when opting to pull in an OSS dependency for our own projects (from npm or docker or rubygems or rust crates or...): we need to decide on our own how far to trust the software maintainers.
The android permissions model offers some degree of protection in both stores from hostile software. However, unlike the Play Store which offers only a couple of tags (contains in-app purchases / contains ads), in F-Droid any known "antifeatures" (i.e. association with paid services) are listed explicitly in the catalogue.
As for abandonware (or other software that F-Droid drops for practical concerns), users could still acquire the code and build it themselves, which means that a developer stepping away from a piece of software does not mean a user needs to say goodbye.
This whole industry-wide proactive campaign against misinformation since 2016 has been a disaster. COVID has helped amplified the flaws. The fact this was going to cause an endless amount of false positives negating the wider value proposition should have been obvious since day one.
The worst acts by powerful organizations are almost always done under the guise of 'helping people'. Nobody oppresses you for the sake of oppression. They'll do it under the banner of some good intentions.
Google shows why merely collecting the smartest minds from around the world in one place is not good enough on its own. They need proper leadership and strong values to guide them ... two things Google has long lacked.
Google should be more careful about banning high ranking/rated apps. It looks anti-competitive considering they want more people using Google podcasting app.
I'd like to think this was an accident somewhere down the chain and will be remedied in the morning. I love the app and hope it gets sorted out.
It's been 2 days, How long do we wait until we conclude it isn't an accident?
>It looks anti-competitive
Why would google care at this point? Regulators world wide are basically useless. They might sue Google eventually and years later Google might settle for 1% of the profit they made as a result. So why would they ever care?
Podcast Addict is a great app. I came across it back when I was playing around with Tasker, and it was such a fun app to create tasks around simply because the developer has exposed so much through Intents. A really positive platform, such a shame to see Google quashing this sort of thing.
What is going on with Google? We had PushBullet being threatened with removal over vague problems just a few days ago.
I don't buy the "evil monopoly" narrative as what does this accomplish for Google?
Probably a sign of over-reliance on automated systems
Google has an explicit notice up on YouTube Studio, at least, saying that they'll remove content that might not violate copyright because they are cutting back on human review. (It doesn't seem to occur to them that they could err on the side of not assuming copyright, though.) I'm sure this is part of the same trend.
They can't "err on the side of not assuming copyright". They have to block things first, ask questions later according to various laws and agreements around the world, or they will open themselves up to massive lawsuits, principally from big music labels.
I also don't buy the "evil monopoly" narrative I think it is automated flagging algorithms, humans are only "approving" bans.
Censorship simply does not scale. A centralized entity cannot get all the details correct, and a larger community has more diverging values. The more Google attempts to police information, the more wrong judgments it makes. It's inevitable.
People keep trying to sue (and otherwise legally punish) Google and similar platforms for not policing their content enough.
This is the inevitable result.
> In order to get the app restored, Google is asking Guillemane to remove references to COVID-19 and keywords related to COVID-19 from the app.
So is this a metadata issue, or a content issue?
It’s a tyrannical anti-trust issue.
Why does a general use podcast app have covid in its search keywords? Scumbag marketing tactic; kudos to google if that’s all this is over.
Did it? Looking at the Google cache of the Play Store page, the only references I can find to covid, virus or similar terms are reviews saying they downloaded it because of the lockdown and are happy with it.
Edit: Here's how the page looked the day before takedown, no hints here at least of them doing anything like that: http://web.archive.org/web/20200515172150/https://play.googl...
And even if they were, couldn't a general app say something along "listen to your favorite sports podcasts, ted talks or get the latest news about X"?
It auto-recommends (very) popular podcasts. Guess what: many of them have Covid-related episodes.
Meanwhile on Google's own podcast search engine https://podcasts.google.com/?q=covid-19. Content management teams are too powerful, this needs to be decided by some kind of content board within the company and not by one person who is leading the content management team within Google Play.
Wow, rather Orwellian. The referenced authorities aren't even in agreement on a lot of basics about covid, and had given false information on key aspects earlier. We can also rightfully draw some conclusions about covid, e.g. looking at data, without needing to be an official authority. Google has smart people, so this makes it all the more distressing.
The only Podcast app worth using.
I hope Google understands the slippery slope they are treading and its implications and consequences.
I disagree, I was on Podcast Addict and then moved to Pocket Casts and did not look back.
Podcast Addict's UI was a bit too full for the simple use I do of podcasts.
It was (is?) a great podcast app for power users.
I don't like this. Podcasts operate on open standards, anyone can launch an RSS feed which can then be played on any app.
Banning this app is like banning web browsers because the allow access "questionable" websites or banning search engines because they index such sites.
I hate how much (dis/mis)information is being spread about COVID-19, but banning an entire podcast app leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
This is exactly why we should stop those megalomaniacs at Google (or other) from taking over Podcasting... We don't want to repeat the same RSS mistake again.
If you respect and enjoy podcasts, don't use google apps.
Edit: my recommendation is AntennaPod. I used to use and love PocketCast until NPR effed it.
>has been suspended on the grounds that some of the podcasts it indexes reference the coronavirus but aren’t approved by government entities or public health organizations.
I don't know. The google should ban itself for they indexes reference the coronavirus but... oh well.
Wow, what a shitty move... Even if this is an automated process, this is still shitty. This app is one of a select few I think work perfectly, as it does exactly what I want it to do. It was also the first app I paid for since it was so good.
Given how much corporations pull the strings in America, how far away are we from China's authoritarian policies, especially as they relate to freedom of speech?
Other posters have rightfully pointed out that the internet is indeed open and free (for the most part), but good luck getting all of your friends to agree to use your new DIY whatsapp clone. Effectively, everyone who doesn't know how to standup their own website is completely at the mercy of these technology companies now.
Furthermore, the channels of communication most people use are now being forced through these tech companies because of recent events. The amount of control sitting under Google at this very moment is sickening.
Seriously think about it. If Google went completely AWOL, how much damage could they do to the world? How much control do they actually have over every Android handset and web user experience? I feel we need to start looking at Google in terms of the worst-case scenario, and then start planning policy around that. There is just too much at stake now.
This is so scary. Any dissent is being deprived of oxygen.
Do Google offer a more censored version of Apple's Podcasts index? My favourite podcast app on iOS (Overcast) uses Apple's index as its source for search/recommendations (though obviously you can add any other feed yourself) and there's heaps and heaps of non-Government approved podcasts on the topic. If you run a Podcasting app on Android, does an index even exist that you can use and remain compliant?
Whatever index they use on podcasts.google.com is full of the same, so I'm leaning toward no. https://podcasts.google.com/?q=covid19&hl=en-GB
It sounds like it is the indexing that's the issue here. Worth noting that if they ever crack down on Podcast apps being able to play non-indexed content they'll wipe out the whole Patreon economy around podcasts, which relies on sharing private feeds with subscribers.
Another thread with a different source here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219438
This one seems to make me think that the app itself (or its play store listing) maybe has terms in metadata (to help with searching in the store maybe?)
> to remove references to COVID-19 and keywords related to COVID-19 from the app
Wait. Is this from the app apk or from dynamic content displayed on the app?
If it's the former, it's fair enough, if it's from the latter it's just another SNAFU by Google.
Their automated system/review process is broken with respect to apps that render user generated content.
I've had several requests from Google over the last couple of years to make changes to my app to remove user generated content that is being rendered in the app. Sigh.
Yet another example of the dangers of handing Google a monopoly on Android app stores. If you control the means of distribution, you can control the content of what gets distributed. It is time for some anti-trust action here!
In the meantime consumers should support other app stores like https://f-droid.org/.
I highly recommend the open source AntennaPod podcast app: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.danoeh.antennapod/
Looks like this is finally being sorted out. Tweet from Hiroshi Lockheimer an SVP at Google (which puts him in the top ~12 execs at the company):
Apologies to Podcast Addict fans today. We are still sorting out kinks in our process as we combat Covid misinformation, but this app should not have been removed. Carry on with your podcasts, folks! ️
https://mobile.twitter.com/lockheimer/status/126255336932064...
I love Podcast Addict to the point of signing up for Patreon to support Xavier with a monthly donation. I'm all for doing thoughtful moderation to prevent your system being gamed by malign actors, but Google is clearly in the wrong here, and their implied policy of moderating with as few humans as possible means that a standout app is taking fire for a situation it could not possibly be accountable for.
Timing is suspicious, Google is finally beginning the final phase of Play Music shutdown, which means Google Podcasts will be the new way to access podcasts.
Because it makes a ton of sense to move music to YouTube music, but the podcasts to something entirely different.
They're blindly stumbling around making sure the public will think they're pretty deserving of any and all antitrust hammers than swing their way in the near future.
COVID-19 is the terrorism of this generation. It's the anything goes, doesn't matter how fair, as long as it's because COVID.
Terrorism became a US obsession because a little over 3,000 died on our soil. Covid-19 will kill 100,000 or more.
The fear is justified and the extreme prejudice against Covid-19 misinformation (most of which has an agenda behind it) is warranted.
This particular case may go too far, but that has no bearing on whether the other efforts against misinformation are too extreme.
This just shows how bad our reaction was. We spent years looking for WMDs and came up empty handed. We should have done nothing, just like this situation. People are getting sick of this s*.
What is the agenda?
I agree.
It’s badly affected air travel and who knows what changes will result (or what contracts for pointless bio-security theatre have been made)
In the UK, a 300+ page law was basically pre-written and enacted very quickly, reminiscent of the early anti terrorism law.
We have set up a bio security unit, currently headed by the security services.
UK has a “threat level” system for coronavirus similar to the terror threat level.
The government talk about it in threatening terms such as it being everywhere and it not going away.
If you are against measures you can easily be accused of wanting old people to die.
The UK was absolutely petrified of it at the beginning shown by the very successful self policed lockdown.
Definitely some similarities
Do you think it's unjustified? Other countries have acted much more quickly and saved lots of lives.
Personally, I don’t. Terrorism has killed fewer people in the UK than Covid19, despite having. 50+ year head start.
One can equally say the PATRIOT act was justified and saved lives. Many people here agreed with that for years until Snowden etc revealed that it was unjustified.
> One can equally say the PATRIOT act was justified and saved lives.
No, there's plenty of public evidence that lockdowns reduce the spread of COVID-19 and save lives; that's not true for the PATRIOT Act. So this is false, as well as being a red herring...
> Many people here agreed with that for years until Snowden etc revealed that it was unjustified.
I don't think that Snowden and other whistleblowers revealed that the PATRIOT Act was unjustified so much as that what was actually authorized by the PATRIOT Act was a drop in the bucket to what the US government was actually doing in surveillance.
The proximate result of which was Congress expanding surveillance authority to legalize much of what had been being done illegally (authority it is currently in the process of renewing), so clearly it's not even a universal conclusion, even now, that the unauthorized surveillance they revealed was unjustified.
>In the UK, a 300+ page law was basically pre-written and enacted very quickly, reminiscent of the early anti terrorism law.
I'm leery of what you may be trying to imply here. This isn't some conspiracy thing, is it?
I'm leery of what you may be trying to imply. That I think coronavirus was a conspiracy? No. Please don't head towards slander territory just because someone questions a piece of legislation.
I said "reminiscent", i.e it invokes memories. Hastily enacted, a blunt instrument, huge, sweeping changes to legislation, makes human rights organisations nervous etc.
You don't need conspiracies. Just naive people who think that in times of crisis you need to centralise power and who don't think through the consequences.
What does that mean in the UK context specifically ... for example, the COVID law repeals a reform that was made some years ago, after police finally caught the most prolific serial killer in history. He is believed to have killed perhaps 250 people without being caught, because he was a doctor who was forging death certificates. So the rules were changed to require multiple sign-offs on the cause of death, because multiple signoffs on cremation forms were the only way he was originally detected.
In the COVID panic that rule has been removed. Doctors can now put any cause of death they want without anyone checking them. In many countries there are now widespread reports of elderly relatives being assigned COVID as a cause of death in care homes, when the family members know they repeatedly tested negative and weren't sick.
Even better, the rule that said multiple psychiatry opinions are required to involuntarily commit someone was also repealed. In other words the government anticipated their policies would lead to both mass mental breakdown and civil disobedience; allowing a single doctor to effectively imprison someone indefinitely without any trial or any checks/balances at all, looks like a rather neat solution to that, doesn't it?
All these changes are in a sense well intentioned, the lawmakers believed speed is more important than accuracy. Those beliefs are wrong.
I think the implication is that there is always a block for government over-reach and waiting for a convenient excuse to execute it.
Just as the implication isn't that the PATRIOT act authors did 9/11, they certainly took the momentum of the aftermath of a tragedy to push their pre-existing agenda.
I agree it is being used to reduce freedoms, but I disagree that the parallel to terrorism is very good. Firstly, the risk from terrorism was always going to be sporadic and focused -- it is/was never an effective application of 'force'. For that you need a WMD arsenal like a State. COVID is directly and effectively killing people in massively higher numbers. Secondly, terrorism mitigation was always justified using details and intelligence that the people asking for power (military, intelligence agencies, boarder enforcement) would refuse to share. The public would not be privy to the justifications in the interests of National Security. Again, with COVID, we instead are getting statistics summaries from the government but they are being sourced from public sources of civilian interaction, namely hospitals, research labs, universities. The public can second-source and confirm the justifications. The interventions are currently being couched as temporary with some caveats regarding medical research and immunity. If COVID interventions become overly protracted, we the public can protest along with the current Trumpian crazies (who have the right very basal idea but are utterly confused and probably co-opted with regard to who they are shouting at and when they should have started shouting.) Terrorism threat assessment is privileged process. Quite different IMHO. Unfortunately only "time will tell" if COVID morphs into this secret control state in some way, currently it's all open-source. Until then, all power to the medical and epidemiology bodies and I will shout at anyone getting in THEIR way.
Like many others, this is also my favorite podcasting app.
Just a couple of weeks ago, I was using this exact app to listen to the "Making Sense" podcast by Sam Harris, on the topic of covid-19. This is clearly not a government source, but as usual, Sam probes with some of the most intelligent, nuanced questions on this topic. It would be sad to see discussions like these get suppressed with the rest under Google's policy.
I've been a Pixel/Nexus user for about a decade. I'm feeling it's finally time to get out of Google-land and move to a more open phone with F-Droid. I don't trust Google to use their power fairly. Any recommendations for devices?
Apple denied an update for one of my apps because in the What's new text I said "In the quarantine we've learned to make friends with bugs in the home, but in the app they must be CRUSHED" They said "Inappropriate references to the COVID-19 pandemic"
I hadn't seen this discussed yet, but how did Google know that Podcast Addict was indexing corona-related content? What was the mechanism that triggered the ban? The developer's twitter said that he didn't include any corona keywords in the play store metadata, nor in the source code. The consensus seems to be that some automated system was too aggressive in banning.
My best guess is that the source for the info used to ban PA would be the reviews, i.e. someone posted a review mentioning "great podcasts about corona" or something. But I can't imagine it's that simple, because then I can just put "corona" in any review and get somebody's app banned.
Unless Google has some other way of tracking PA's content?
@dang: the URL of the article is https://reclaimthenet.org/google-play-suspends-podcast-addic... - not apple.news which is mere redirect.
This is my favorite app. I even got the paid version with no ads. Is there a way we can continue to support the developer? The app is so good and non-commerical. :-(
I definitely agree that these enormous platforms should not be allowed to censor us. It's highly authoritarian that the monopolist owners of huge platforms can just shut off dissenting voices. (After all, what else does it mean to only allow government sources that so often lie as in the case with masks or with the safety of reopening?) In any case, you can't stop the conspiracy theories from being promoted by shutting off podcasts when the president of the US is promoting some of them. News is gonna cover it regardless.
I might be bitter, but I have little love for corporations and their role in the public debate. And I abhor that they play moral compass. Call me a cynic, but that is really beautiful and bold of them. Don't pay taxes, evade worker laws and be cynical enough to proudly present how diverse you are and at the same time let your workers rot in the warehouses (I am looking at you AWS). "Look at the blind, talk to the deaf, listen to the mute and prey on the weak!" seems to be there motto.
The quicker multinationals like this are broken up, the better. For me personally, this is another reason to try to not use Google or Alphabet, it is not easy, but not impossible (yet).
Is this a desperate attempt to fix fake news? Or are they obeying some government order?
If anybody here knows Hiroshi Lockheimer (SVP platforms), please ping him about this.
This is a huge part of the reason why I think we should go with mobile-first web design rather than build native apps that have to go through these stores. I have to build and deploy a mobile app on iOS and Android for work and it's a) a pain in the ass and b) we're at the mercy of these two megacorporations.
If you can get by without a separate mobile app, do so. And if you need some functionality, consider pushing for that to be a part of the web standard and contributing to whatever projects can make that functionality accessible through the browsers.
It's time to regulate Google, Facebook, and Twitter as Common Carriers. They can control the pipes, but not the content flowing through them, like the phone company.
Use f-droid and install antennapod.
I had the same issue. I developed a legit and anonymous contact-tracing app [1], and there is no way I can easily distribute it on the app stores as Google and Apple unconditionally ban any app that makes any reference to the current pandemic.
[1] https://github.com/RaphaelJ/covid-tracer
They should ban Chrome from the Play Store because I can access non-approved Covid-19 content through it.
I say this sarcastically now, but web browsers will definitely become tools of censorship in the near future. Chrome itself will start blocking non-approved content. The Internet will no longer allow the distribution of any and all information, but only what is "approved".
I haven't seen this mentioned, but if this was the result of an automated process with no human review, do apps from com.google.* have a hardcoded exemption? Is there a low paid outsourced staff somewhere that provides the same exemption function? Are there any examples of Google's automated processes banning any of their own apps (or the entire account....)?
I'm impressed they actually gave a reason, what happened to "please RTFM for our terms and conditions" and "sorry I have given all the information I have, there is nothing more I can do, appeal denied"
Example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23223560
This is what happens when you give a company/person to control your everything. Stop selling your data without actually selling.
Although you sometimes have to manually copy the RSS feed in, SoundWaves is not bad at all: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.bottiger.podcast/
I am actually curious if any of you have other recommended apps from F-droid
Sadly, SoundWaves is super buggy if you have a larger font size set, and it's auto-playlist function is super annoying.
I prefer AntennaPod, another open-source app podcast app that's much less opinionated and has a few more features (but not bloated like most podcast apps).
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.danoeh.antennapod/
It's also available on the Google App Store.
I like how both of these apps actually let you manually set the RSS address, because most don't.
Does anyone at Google realize how toxic this is for their brand? When I see stuff like this, as a developer I think:
- 1. Wow, I'm never building an Android app if I can build a web app instead.
- 2. There is no way I am ever switching from an iPhone to an Android phone if apps get censored like this (although I'm sure Apple does similar things).
I find point #2 confusing. Doesn't iPhone have stronger restrictions on what can be installed as an app?
I hope Progressive Web Apps will disrupt the App store/Google Play store and will decentralize app distribution again
Like others in this thread, I use this app every day. Just a few weeks ago I was thinking about how much benefit I've gotten out of it and decided to get the paid version to give something back. On the rare occasions when I've had issues, my bug reports have gotten quick, friendly and useful responses from Xavier.
I would be quite happy for Google to disappear. I'm beginning to think that anyone who works for it should consult their conscience.
Podcast Addict is not only the best podcast client but one of the best apps available.
Sorry I don't have anything substantive to add to the conversation, just wanted to add my vote for Podcast Addict.
So would they have banned an app that told people to wear masks when the CDC and WHO said they were not effective? I proudly went against government advice then and plan on doing a lot of things against government advice in the future. This pandemic has highlighted the rot in government institutions.
Google is under a great deal of scrutiny by governments right now. Their collective fight-or-flight behavior has kicked in and they're starting to exhibit some pretty crazy behavior.
There's never been a better time to excise Google from your life, or if you work there, to excise your life from theirs.
I used to think the internet was this great place resistant to censorship and government intervention. Instead you now have to tip-toe around and every comment ist tied to your real identity forever. At least I‘m using Apple, so pissing off Google won’t mean I can’t use electronic payments.
> What Google is asking of Podcast Addict would be comparable to Google asking a web browser app to remove references to all the websites and social media posts that reference the coronavirus unless the reference comes from an official government entity or public health organization.
Give it a few years
Or asking reddit to censor content and keywords when displaying user-generated content while using their app on Android.
This is unhealthy behavior towards the open web, which Google seems to work aggressively towards its full control through web browser, ads, and cloud computing.
Google's own stuff doesn't filter content from non-govt sources, guess it's time to suspend?
Seems like it's back up, with no changes to the app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bambuna.po...
Good news!
Seems like a mistake by an automated system. It's a bummer that there's infrequent mixups like this, but I do wonder what the alternative is. YouTube faces a similarly hard moderation problem. There's nothing they could do to appease even just 90% of criticisms.
This is obviously overreach in my opinion, and (tangentially) might explain the bump in installs for my podcast player. I had a feature on COVID, guess I’m going to remove that... (I know that doesn’t protect the app from removal, but could delay it, I don’t know)
Pretty ironic given that an "official government source" advocated the ineffective and dangerous drug hydroxychloroquine and suggested people inject bleach into their bodies.
Edit: Changed hydroxyquinone to the correct hydroxychloroquine.
Where is the proof of inefficacy? For the record, there's no proof of efficacy either, because all the trials done that prove or disprove efficacy of hydroxychloroquine were flawed in one point or the other (at least the ones I've read).
To give an answer to this endless debate, a proper, randomized clinical trial is needed. And the conditions set correctly, too: lopinavir and ritonavir were, per NEJM, not successful, but a later study in Lancet showed that administration at earlier time points (within 7 days of symptom onset) might be working and needs more investigation.
I know Novartis is running a trial, and so is U of Minnesota[1] which has finally completed enrollment and will release results after peer review.
Oh, and more on topic, it looks like Twitter has blocked a legitimate page of the Canadian part of the same group of trials[2].
[1] https://covidpep.umn.edu/
[2] https://twitter.com/DrToddLee/status/1261442201369939968
> Where is the proof of inefficacy?
It doesn't work that way. New drugs are assumed ineffective until proven otherwise. A government official with no medical training recommending an unproven drug based on a few anecdotes is the height of irresponsibility.
Currently the studies can't tell if HCQ is effective or not because all of them have been wasted opportunities for many different reasons, from too few patients, to absence of controls, to too late administration (the NEJM paper and the Lancet paper on lopinavir/ritonavir tell important lessons on this topic). We're in the "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" territory.
I would say HCQ is a "lead" in the pharmacological sense (after all there's an effect in vitro), but of course there's no guarantee it will work properly (work as in "higher efficacy than placebo or other treatments") in vivo.
The reason for my comment is that the announcement by the "government official" (who was not the first, the first being the eccentric Dr.Raoult) turned what should have been scientific debate into a political flamefest (at least in the media). And science (aka, proper, randomized clinical trials) got lost in the way (at some point the U of Minnesota trial struggled to get new people).
I personally don't have any particular love for HCQ: chances are, like remedisivir, that if there is an effect, it is small. But I want to point out that so far science is still out on this one.
> I would say HCQ is a "lead" in the pharmacological sense
Agreed. I hope it gets proven effective too. This is a hot button issue for me because a family member needs HCQ for lupus and now cannot obtain it because of the statements of said government official. His words have caused actual harm, and this isn't the first time.
The null hypothesis is that it does not work, not the other way around. There is no need to prove inefficacy.
> Where is the proof of inefficacy?
This is a really odd idea. Drugs are normally assumed ineffective until proven otherwise.
Studies are coming in daily showing no benefit from HCQ. As this article [1] points out, any other drug would not be looked at further given the current set of information. But, since HCQ has been seen as a cure, a lot more time and money will be spent showing the same results - no effect.
[1] https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/no-benefit-fro...
Most of these are retrospective and observational, and they fail to answer the question posed by the very controversial (and flawed) Raoult paper: that is, that early administration during the course of the disease provides a clinical benefit. Also in many the control is standard of care, which can mean everything and nothing.
The positive studies suffer from the same issues, by the way. Especially controls are pretty bad.
These studies can't give the answers that a proper randomized controlled trial (against placebo), like the U of Minnesota one (but there are a few others) can.
Some studies focus on mortality, but I doubt HCQ helps there: like remedisivir, the measure should be time to symptom clearance / hospital discharge. Time of administration also matters a lot (see again the NEJM paper on lopinavir / ritonavir, a failure, then the Lancet paper that gives more insight at earlier time points). One study I've read gave HCQ at 16 days post symptom onset (median): that time is definitely too late for any antiviral therapy.
I reiterate: I have no personal interest in having HCQ succeed. What I want to see is good science.
Has there been any scientific assessment of how powerful Google is compared to governments?
Governments in general seem to be lagging hard behind advances on the net. More and more power is ending up in the hands of companies.
Update: https://twitter.com/lockheimer/status/1262553369320648704
There seems to be this mistaken idea that smartphones are like small PCs that can make phone calls. But they're really far more like gaming consoles. They're pretty much locked down.
Google Anthos is an attempt to do the same with business software? Soon, if you have to list your business software in Anthos store, you will be at mercy of Google.
This problem has a simple solution. Don't host your stuff with giant corporations who's only motivation is avoiding conflict and making profit.
Asking a non-dev user to manually download and install an APK might be a simple solution, but so impractical that it's almost useless in my opinion.
The main thing I miss from moving to iPhone from android was podcast addict. It was such a good app. Can't find anything near as good for iPhone
... I switched to podcast addict after giving up on Google ever getting their heads out of their own butts on GPM and Google Podcasts.
Now they're banning it???
Aren't podcasts essentially audio files over RSS?
Broke: culture war over general purpose computation.
Woke: culture war over general purpose content distribution.
There are now podcast distribution services where you can host your podcasts and there are several things wrong with them:
- as a consumer, I am expected to install every podcast application that hosts podcasts I like.
- they usually don't expose RSS feeds because god forbid someone uses a third-party, general-purpose, RSS-based podcast application.
If you like appstores you have to like censorship as well. Welcome to the future of the World Not so Wide Web
This is terrible, I've paid for the paid version for a while and have been a big fan of Podcast Addict.
So is Google's own podcast app similarly banned? This is really quite pathetic.
Ah man, this is one the few apps I use daily. Even remember the guys name, Xavier something.
If we have the app already, it will still work right? Damn that's brutal.
A solid open source phone can't get here soon enough.
The author has to blame himself that he is selling his app in the Google Play store. Then, of course, the author is exposed to Google's despotism. Sell the .apk somewhere else.
What were the offending podcasts?
So Reddit has /r/conspiracy that can be accessed through the app, should that be removed?
Google routinely bans reddit clients for ability to access NSFW pictures
Firefox lets you access Pornhub.
Why is that not banned?
That’s fine. Now they are no longer protected by section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
What a load of garbage, next they'll ban overcast because they let people subscribe to RSS feeds, and some people have hard left/right wing podcasts, or anything you want to see that's not mainstream.
#boycottGoogle
fdroid
Original link: https://reclaimthenet.org/google-play-suspends-podcast-addic...
Weird that Apple does this proxying... not going to open up that News app.
Or their tweet [0] which I posted here earlier [1] (but didn't get any traction).
[0]: https://mobile.twitter.com/PodcastAddict/status/126165151294... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23207039
This isn't what phishing is. You might not like it, but that doesn't make it phishing.
Your parent post might have been changed, but it currently says 'proxying', not 'phishing'.
It said 'phishing' yes.
Parent could have posted something along the lines of 'ah yes, phishing is something else', but ah well.
Dang, can we change the link to https://reclaimthenet.org/google-play-suspends-podcast-addic...?
weirder because the website being proxy-ed is all about privacy protections. I am pretty sure I just submitted data I did not intend to to apple.
Good news, it's not Apple, so you can still easily download and install the app.
The bad news is Google is acting like Apple.
I really hate how Google and Facebook have become "Ministries of truth". Especially since they are some of the most agenda ridden, scummy companies in existence. And you can down vote me straight to hell and back for that statement, it doesn't make it any less true.
Me too, makes me want to puke. I hate companies like this.
It's sad to see an American company stooping to basically tin-pot levels of disrespect for human rights.
Contact the FTC, because this is an example of Google leveraging a non-arms-length arrangement to interfere with and exclude competitors to their own products Google Podcasts and YouTube which directly violate the policy they are applying to Podcast Addict.
There is no legitimate business function served by this inconsistent conduct, and it looks like a textbook case of single-firm anticompetitive conduct.
Google is behaving pathologically and directly attacking the dialectic. They are quickly becoming one of the most harmful software vendors in the US.
Continuing to use their software and services in any way is extremely irresponsible. Deplatform now!
I just noticed that this is the same shit right wing organization that conveniently protects alt-right stuff when it gets banned from somewhere. Can we please not promote this kind of stuff here?
Edit: to back myself up.
Here is this website standing behind authoritarian right-wing government doing antisemitic dogwhistles: https://reclaimthenet.org/hungarian-government-facebook-over...
Here it is protecting conspiracy theorists against "censorship": https://reclaimthenet.org/youtube-demonetizes-sgtreport-trur...
Here it is covering the ban of a known right-wing troll (also piss drinker) Joey Salads: https://reclaimthenet.org/twitter-suspends-joey-salads/
Here it is supporting a fringe far-right social network Gab a bunch of times: https://reclaimthenet.org/gab-biggest-mastadon-node/ https://reclaimthenet.org/new-gab-decentralized-version/ https://reclaimthenet.org/gab-chat/ https://reclaimthenet.org/gab-pro-benefits/
It's just so much consistent support for basically fascists on this. Propping this website up is dangerous.
Really disturbing that I had to scroll right to the bottom of the page to find someone questioning the source of this.
While obviously Podcast Addict does not deserve a ban, the sheer number of people in this thread advocating unrestricted speech around COVID-19 is thoroughly disturbing. This despite the carnage that the disease is wreaking in the US and UK right now, and the fact that conspiracy theories spread on Google and Facebook platforms have certainly added significant fuel to the fire of COVID-19.
Even down here in NZ we're dealing with cell towers being set alight due to batshit conspiracy theories spread on Facebook and Youtube. I'm generally very much pro-free speech, but this is one thing that needs to be stamped down on fast, mainly due to more and more americans gathering in large protests and spreading the virus.
> While obviously Podcast Addict does not deserve a ban, the sheer number of people in this thread advocating unrestricted speech around COVID-19 is thoroughly disturbing.
Are you sure that advocating a "stamp down" won't throw away the baby with the bathwater? In my country, a lot of now very legitimate theories (thrombosis and treatment with heparin, convalescent plasma therapy) were slammed by certain very prominent experts at first ("baloney", "colossal idiocy"). What would've happened if Twitter or Google decided to remove the "controversial" theories?
Also, Twitter now is blocking an URL of a legitimate university promoting a trial with hydroxychloroquine. As you can see, to remove the "batshit conspiracy theories" we are also removing good science.
>Also, Twitter now is blocking an URL of a legitimate university promoting a trial with hydroxychloroquine.
What university? What sources do you have on that?
McGill University in Canada.
Source: https://twitter.com/DrToddLee/status/1261442201369939968
Works fine for me. Sounds like automated filter kicking in, which is a double-edged sword, but in itself doesn't say anything abt Twitter's stance here.
> While obviously Podcast Addict does not deserve a ban, the sheer number of people in this thread advocating unrestricted speech around COVID-19 is thoroughly disturbing. This despite the carnage that the disease is wreaking in the US and UK right now, and the fact that conspiracy theories spread on Google and Facebook platforms have certainly added significant fuel to the fire of COVID-19.
There's no other solution to this problem. If they suspend Podcast Addict, realistically, they need to suspend every other podcast app on the store. Then they need to start filtering out all podcasts with episodes about coronavirus on their own podcast app, or their need to suspend that too.
And that's before considering that there's a lot of valuable discussion about the virus happening that isn't coming out of the CDC or whatever other official source you're adamant about following. I'm not talking Joe Rogan. I'm talking PBS, NPR, 538, JAMA, etc. At some point all you're doing is suppressing legitimate journalism (and yes, there's a fuckload of legitimate journalism on podcasts) or even academic sources (yes, they exist as podcasts too).
I don't see what benefit you're getting from suppressing freedom of speech in such a draconian way when there's so much unnecessary collateral damage. All you're doing is making it harder for legitimate coverage to reach people ... which seems like shooting yourself in the foot.
Even beyond journalism, there's a lot of "slice of life" episodes talking about how people are affected by the virus day-to-day. How people's lives have changed. How they're coping. Why would you be in favour of suppressing that?
Good. When private companies see that something they are doing or enabling could lead to preventable human death, they have a responsibility to act on it.
If an app in their marketplace is helping spread misinformation about a public health crisis, that app can and should be removed from Google's marketplace.
America is a capitalist society. If you're going to do business in Google's ecosystem, you have to follow Google's rules. Google isn't tolerating COVID-19 misinformation, so if you're an app publisher in Google's ecosystem, you should adopt a similar stance.
Human life is on the line here. Google is doing the right thing.
> Human life is on the line here. Google is doing the right thing.
Right thing for their bottom line, you can continue to use Google Podcasts though
Freedom of speech is a bitch but a necessary one...
At what point is this wrongthink under the guise of public safety?
If there was a red button that kills the Internet, Google would press it.
So would I, at this point.
Meta:
Why are you posting an Apple News link that is a redirection to the original source, instead of the original source?
The have been discussing covid 19 on my radio, fuck I guess that means they are going to impound my car.
So what’s the problem? HN users always complain about Apple’s “walled garden” and how much better Android is because users can sideload apps.
(Note sarcasm)
I'm pretty sure POTUS doesn't approve google. Please ban yourself.
This is disgusting, Google has become disgusting..
This is exactly why Google and maybe other large corporations absolutely need to get split up. I hope Trump takes action against US tech companies as he have said he would. Very few things would make me happier as an european.
This actually feels like an intentional move by Google to NOT get split up. Don’t worry government, we got your back! We’ll ban things that aren’t approved by you!
Yes Google wants to do this via a Podcast app. The lengths people here go to to rationalize their bias is shocking. Have fun in your bubble.
No they are doing this via Section 8.3 of the Developer Distribution Agreement. Sadly the Podcast app is collateral damage.
No, it's a service to public health to take down crap. People spreading "covid19 is fake" propaganda are literally getting themselves, their parents and friends killed. Freedom of speech also comes with responsibility - the responsibility of not endangering others with your speech. Similar as inciting hatred and screaming "fire" in a crowded restaurant will earn you jail time, people should be happy it's only their YT channel killed and not their sorry asses landing in jail!
I would have no problem if covid19 was taking out only those propaganda spouting idiots from the gene pool, but unlike let's say people ignoring gun safety laws and pointing a loaded shotgun at their feet which then goes off and blasts their feet away but like as with antivaxxers, anything involving infectious diseases also endangers innocent people. Mothers, fathers, children, the weakest of societies.
I am incredibly lucky to not have lost someone close to me to the 'rona, but other people I know have not been that lucky. So every time I hear someone "we gotta open up for the economy!!!" I'd like to throw these idiots in a jail cell and let the keys sink to the bottom of the Mariana Trench out of empathy for those affected by the reality.
first
>the 'rona
Please just don't.
Second, this is an index of all podcasts. If you are going to ban index searches google should also ban their own search engine because right now I can search for plenty of corona propaganda using it.
You do realize that google's policy isn't just targeting the "corona is fake news" crowd, right? The wording says any app "referencing COVID-19" not published/endorsed by the government or a public health organization got to go.
If google applied this consistently it should have to ban the following apps: Google Chrome[1], Firefox[1], Opera[1], Google[2], Google News[3], Google Podcast[2], Netflix[4], Youtube[3], Play Store[2, 3], any news/journalism organization (including CNN, PBS, NYTimes, BBC (uk), ARD/ZDF (de)), reddit[3], twitter[3], facebook[3], and plenty plenty more.
But at least Jair Bolsonaro is still free to put out fake news apps if he wants because he is head of the government...
[1] Allows access to sites such as google[2].
[2] Allows access to "fake news". And it has a covid warning section linking to (thereby endorsing) non-approved sources such as wikipedia.
[3] Displays/Links to a lot of non-government approved journalism and "journalism".
[3] e.g. https://www.netflix.com/de-en/title/81273378