The rationale they gave is that hate speech appears on these apps, because some of the microblogging sites that can be accessed via Fediverse have this kind of content. Based on this rationale, I look forward to Google Play removing Chrome, Firefox, and all other web browsers from the store as well.
This sort of decision by Google does make me rather uncomfortable (the entire situation is uncomfortable... https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentr...). But it's worth understanding why the situation may be a bit more complicated than is described above. What seems to be happening is not an absolute ban on Fediverse apps, but a ban on specific implementations that make it easy to join specific communities which encourage hatred and real-world violence. Other implementations block these instances, and I believe are not banned.
Whether or not this is a good thing is a complex question. If you happen to be the target of this hatred and violence, and feel it is an existential threat to your livelihood, you might believe that it is a good thing to make it more difficult for those who are engaging in this behavior to enlarge their communities. On the other hand, if you believe eliminating communities by platform fiat is an existential threat to your livelihood, this may seem like a very bad thing.
(You might also think it's hypocritical, since you can access most of these communities via a browser. Google also controls the browser, and does make it difficult already to access some sites https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/v4 . However, it does seem to have a higher bar for browsers than for social apps (e.g. malware, csam, iirc); some have suggested that there are legal reasons for this, I'm curious to learn more on this, but I have not seen any substantiation yet.)
So Google somehow knows which apps block certain instances, which generally get reputation among other instances & are quickly blocked? That's not believable.
Why isn't that believable?
How does Google know this unless they have some access to the databases of each of those sites/instances? Why would google have that kind of access?
Couldn't this get done as part of the manual review of an app's source code? It seems like this wouldn't necessarily have to be automated
And right after that we can remove any FTP client that uses the FTP protocol to download content Google doesn't like. We should scan all apps that use a common, published protocol to make sure the protocol is not being used to consume objectionable content. /s
The app is not the service; the protocol is not the platform.
I think you might have misread my comment; I wasn't suggesting whether a course of action was correct or not, but just explaining how it could technically be feasible. I interpreted the comment I responded to as not understanding how it would be possible for Google to have done this a certain way, and I was theorizing one possible way they might have done it.
Ah, then yes, apologies -I did not mean to put words in your mouth. Technical feasibility is likely easier than imagined; most Mastodon services use the auto-generated list that appears on their "about" page - easily scraped if not available through the API - here's the list on the instance I moderate on for example:
https://toot.wales/about/more#unavailable-content
Such apps tend to advertise that they block instances. Tusky, for example, blocks all Gab instances and says so right in the FAQ [1].
[1]: https://github.com/tuskyapp/faq bottom of the page
I currently think this may be exactly what is happening. If I'm wrong, I'd love to know about that!
Does Safe Browsing block sites that the user wants to visit?
> If you happen to be the target of this hatred and violence, and feel it is an existential threat to your livelihood, you might believe that it is a good thing to make it more difficult for those who are engaging in this behavior to enlarge their communities.
I’m indeed being threatened by various hate groups (one of them actually tried, and almost succeeded, to kill an acquaintance), but strangely enough they are never removed by Google or any other big corporations. Worst, each time I voice any slight complain about them, I am the one being censored. Some of those groups are even sometimes getting official support by the GAFAM. This is a really odd and unfair world.
Which groups?
Does that matter?
If op is lying, he or she is lying.
But are some groups ok to threaten? Are some people ok to threaten?
It does matter because I would like to avoid said groups.
I think it matters because sadly I’m at the point where I need to evaluate the death threat for whether it is reasonable to fear from it.
It’s really unfortunate when someone fears for their life and I don’t want that for anyone.
However, lots of people fear for reasons that I don’t think are actually from threats of violence.
I had a friend explain how they literally feared for their life. When trying to console them I learned that the thing that was making them afraid was a friend’s Facebook post about a restaurant that supported some Bible group. Their reasoning was that the Bible group was anti-gay, and they might end up killing them for being an ally of gay friends.
Because of this they feared for their own life and wanted the friend to stop talking about it.
Now of course, there are multiple lame things about Bible groups being jerks, but certainly nothing to make this person think their life was in danger or directly threatened.
I’m not sure how to specifically help that person, but after several episodes like this, I don’t pay much attention to them when they say that they get death threats.
Maybe I’m just jaded but lots of people talk about death threats and I’m sure they perceive them as such. But having the details of the threat helps to differentiate the really dangerous people trying to kill others from the plentitudes of people saying “DIAF” who aren’t trying to kill, just being jerks.
Are you saying the banned apps promote banned sites, or merely don't block banned sites?
There's a huge difference.
“Banned sites”. How short-sighted
This justification still implies Chrome & Firefox also ought be content aware & be censorship machines.
This is grossly unacceptable. Apps need some safe harbor too. Apps can not be responsible for every possible use of the app.
It's a lose-lose scenario for content providers. Lose if you censor (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19274406), lose if you don't (https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/artkmz/youtube_is_f...)
I think it's not apples to apples, one is censoring applications, the other is not censoring videos.
This isn't quite safe harbor. It's not like the app was removed for one user posting one bad content. If what the poster above said is true, it's closer to if an app had a user who regularly broke the rules, and the app refused to ban said person.
Agreed that it's not safe harbor really at stake.
I disagree about your comparison. This app can connect to arbitrary domain names. This is getting blocked because you are not filtering the list of domains a user can connect to proactively.
That's wild & I can think of zero precedent for it.
I'm not sure what you mean by justification. I think I simply lay out some context and a set of conflicting perspectives.
That said, if you don't want Chrome and Firefox to be content aware, then you should argue that safe browsing should be eliminated from Firefox and Chrome. That is a self consistent position, but it may not be consistent with e.g. avoiding dramatic growth in botnets, ransomware, organized crime etc.
Actual safe browsing comes from content-unaware tools like NoScript. And yes, I did spend half a hour going through about:config and neutering everything related to 'Safe' Browsing(R)TM(C)LLC.
> Google also controls the browser, and does make it difficult already to access some sites https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/v4
Safe browsing doesn't include sites for encouraging hatred and violence, etc. Only malware, social engineering, and "harmful"/"unwanted" applications. If they start including those sort of sites in their safe browsing lists, that would make your point here more relevant.
(Of course, some people get hit by safebrowsing unfairly. But I think in most cases, it is because someone compromised their site and used it for a malicious purpose, and then they struggle to get Google to remove it within a timeframe which is reasonable.)
> Safe browsing doesn't include sites for encouraging hatred and violence, etc.
Yet.
When the cathedral supports real-world violence it's good. When you support real-world violence it's bad. They want you dead, but will settle for your submission.
Bingo.
>but a ban on specific implementations that make it easy to join specific communities which encourage hatred and real-world violence.
As you state, one can access these specific communities in a number of ways, including Google Chrome. If the community is the issue, go after the community, not an ActivityPub app that can access content from these and other communities.
Should Google also ban RSS reader apps that don't actively block RSS feeds from sites Google doesn't like?
Oh, please don't suggest banning RSS apps - Apple is already doing that, they removed Pocket Casts and Castro because they allow access to Podcasts that offend Chinese censorship, while Apple's own podcast app remains because it blocks those particular podcasts:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jun/12/apple-rem...
> Apple is already doing that, they removed Pocket Casts and Castro
In china. That is an important note that you left out to make Apple seem worse.
You say there making Apple seem worse, but "They're only censoring the Chinese" doesn't really make them seem any better
Different countries have different cultural norms and laws.
And some of those norms and laws are different in the sense that they are objectively worse.
More like different countries dont enpower their people and treat them like little children.
Free Speech Extremist. Shitposters Club. No Agenda Social. Lets all love Lain.
There are ton of instances which much of the Fediverse blocks, but if you set up your own server and follow people on those instances, it's not 80% hate speech and racism as others would have you believe. Yes there is some of that, but there's also weebs, and anime and political discussion and weird gaming discussion and videos not posted anywhere else and memes and the great diversity of through we use to have on Reddit before it became a monoculture.
There are also straight up anarchist instances that justify violence and destruction of the state like Rage Love, Anticapitalist Party, and others.
It's a very big space, with new players entering and leaving every month.
Banning apps because they do or don't have block lists greatly misunderstands how the Fediverse works.
TYFYC.
Tyfyc2!
Or it exactly understands how it works and Google doesn't much like how it works.
Which i have always suspected was the real reason they killed off Google Wave in such a hurry, even thou we were told they found it useful for collaboration within Google.
It's a bit silly to emphasize specific communities if this results in a ban of the entire app or network. ~all apps and networks have some communities like that. I don't think this is a complex question at all, this is just bad.
The same with Discord or Slack that could be removed, or Facebook
In other words, the developers of these apps need to all run their own Fediverse nodes, _but not federate them to any others_ because otherwise users may be able to access content from nodes that Google doesn't like! Because each dev having to vet every instance out there is the only other option and that's practically impossible.
i think the reason would be that with browsers they don't control the ecosystem enough to get away with it. I actually agree with the ban if your framing is correct (not having looked into it any further), but if they did this in chrome, people would just use another browser to access these sites. you can sideload apps as well of course, but it's much more of a hassle than doing it on PC, where people are used to software distribution not being as centralized
The problem I have isn't that Google bans these apps.
The problem is the fact that Google banning these apps borders on state censorship because of the monopolistic position Google has.
Busting up Google solves the correct problem.
That doesn't make sense. The apps can be made available outside of the play s tore. There's no state level censorship here.
True. This is not censorship. People can still direct-download the APK from Github or from an alternative apps Store.
It concerns me that the company taking down the apps also owns my entire mobile OS from browser to network stack, as well as the DNS resolver, the search engine, and the email client I use.
We've gone from wild west to company towns.
It wasn't that long ago when virtually everyone understood that "hatred" was completely subjective. Trying to remove all communication channels because of the potential for "hatred" means nothing but total silence.
> but a ban on specific implementations that make it easy to join specific communities which encourage hatred and real-world violence
So basically, Google only supports the Fediverse if, like itself, it engages in censorship. The Fediverse exists not to encourage hate speech, but to discourage censorship. Hate speech is the inevitable result of allowing humans to say what like they like. Some people will choose to be nasty. Many people believe the greater good is the free flow of information, and that adults are more than capable of filtering out and avoiding those information sources which make them uncomfortable. Instead, Google wants to treat everybody like children, and be the helicopter parent that swoops in and removes anything objectionable.
They do it with youtube now as well and demonitize ANYTHING with firearms in it. Doesn’t matter if you’re a hunter or trying to sell people on a new product.
All these disparate media sources that we yearned for back in the cable-only days have finally turned to dogshit.
Define "easy to join".
Because if it's "user types in the server URL and tries to log in", blaming the app is ridiculous.
Exactly. This is Google drawing the line on where this "hate speech" is from and they believe that such "content" can be accessed via the Fediverse.
To see how ridiculous this sounds, Google might as well completely take down the entire social media and internet browsing category on the Play Store since I keep seeing the same content from both extremes on all these platforms.
Just wait until you tell them to take down their own browser since you can find this "content" with a simple search. They will soon realise that "drawing the line on hate speech" is more tougher than solving leetcode CS questions.
I get what you're saying, but I don't think this is because Google cares about hate speech. Google is simply using hate speech as an excuse to get rid of apps that it doesn't like. Deciding which apps you like and which you don't isn't that hard of a line to draw.
That's precisely what they are doing. They don't care about hate speech. If they did, they wouldn't have Trump ads on the YouTube banner.
This is justification to get rid of apps they don't like.
Not allowing a parties political ads would be clear favoritism in a political situation. You might not like Trump, but it's quite the jump to say republican ads are "hate speech." .. in fact that's quite literally weaponizing the word "hate speech" to censor political opinions you don't like.
Which is the whole point of hate speech laws. Can't market censorship of one party, but who could ever oppose censoring hate... then redefine hate to be anything you'd like censored, and ... that's what we have now.
Any time anyone complains about censorship, roll out the excuse of holocaust denial, regardless whats actually being censored.
Yes it's why freedom of speech is a thing. Ideas are meant to compete and the power to decide which ideas are acceptable is an absolute power that completely corrupts a society.
Google is politically very very left. I'm guessing that someone at Google may have browsed these apps, decided they didn't like what they saw, and pressured to have the apps banned. Obviously they can't do that to large players like Facebook, but small apps, they can easily crush, and nobody's going to do anything about it.
Image if Google decided to just block certain websites on Chrome, or if big tech got domain registrars to drop 4chan, or whatever humor websites they don't find amusing.
What prevents Google from stopping resolving some domains at 8.8.8.8?
That already happened with certain extremist Islamic websites.
I wonder if Cloudflare is still protecting ISIS sites from DDoSses and the like.
The fascinating part of this is that Google has officially claimed the mantle of arbiter of what is allowed on the internet ( they are not exactly a gate keeper yet, but given how people have trouble accessing information outside FB, Apple, Google gardens, they are well on their way ).
edit: Trouble in a sense that it is inconvenient for them.
You are absolutely right, and this is scary.
Absolute fear.
As the editor of the internet, are they not taking on full legal liability for anything they haven't blocked yet?
No, and there are laws and tomes of case law that reinforce that no matter how much curation they do, an interactive computer service will not be held liable for user generated content.
Yeah but that can be changed with a simple act of Congress and it should be. Their support is rapidly eroding the more they flex their power.
That would be an especially stupid move even for Congress. Expect to see either bland corporate content or goatse everywhere then.
> Just wait until you tell them to take down their own browser
Well, they're taking the address bar away, bit by bit; they have SafeSearch; and they have AMP. It's a very slow erosion, but there will come a point at which going outside of the list of officially acceptable sites will become more difficult - first with mandatory warnings, then maybe with mandatory reporting to law enforcement or whomever, and eventually not at all.
Yes, it sounds like a "slippery slope" argument, but we're a few steps down the slope now, and any argument that encourages us to climb back up has to point out where things may go if we don't resist.
It sucks that this requires us to defend the rights of people to speak whom we may intensely disagree with, but that's the crux of the matter. Either we become mature enough to understand that people will have discourse we dislike, and avoid it or engage with it as we see fit, or we continue to hide behind authority figures who will purport to keep us safe by controlling what we can say and think.
And yet the rest of the category is still there. This is a great opportunity to put on your thinking hat.
Haven't podcasts apps recently been removed as well? Something about it being possible to listen to stuff about covid on them.
Edit, found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23219427
And well, they should probably remove the apps of Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc as it's plenty of hate speech there too.
They didn't remove Podcast Addict, it's right here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bambuna.po...
That was a mistake, presumably. It's likely this is too. The deep desire on the part of posters here to assume malice and scream CENSORSHIP is really off-putting.
I actually don't know anything about fediverse, but if it's like other pseudoanonymous obscure communications media it's probably filled with awful stuff. It's not that hard to imagine a naive reviewer who doesn't understand the architecture to be confused if they get a report showing screenshots of the app with the content available in it.
Honestly it's somewhat telling that Automation for app review can get messy fast and that Google should invest in Apple's approach to app review (but I also agree that the poster is extrapolating the app denial into something much more than what it is)
It's not a desire to scream about sensorship. It's more about how the rules are arbitrarily enforced. And how every app's fate is in the hand of two big players, so you're sol if they ban you. Even if the ban is a mistake, good luck getting it reversed unless you're going viral.
The only reason Podcast Addict has been restored (multiple times) is that it's high-profile, and the owner raised enough stink to cause widespread (enough) outrage about this. Otherwise, whether through malice or incompetence, it would be gone forever.
>The only reason Podcast Addict has been restored (multiple times) is that it's high-profile, and the owner raised enough stink to cause widespread (enough) outrage about this. Otherwise, whether through malice or incompetence, it would be gone forever.
This is my concern. These apps are not content hosts, they are akin to Web browsers or RSS readers, but they are small, one-person endeavours that don't have the clout to get Google to notice the difference between the content providers (the individual Mastodon servers) and the ActivityPub client app that these apps represent.
I know one of the devs is thinking to not push the issue as he's worried about his other apps on the same developer account.
The discussion has veered off into censorship issues, but this is a simple 230-ish problem, these apps are not the Mastodon servers that (presumably) some people have had issues with. They are agnostic client readers of the ActivityPub statuses.
There is no way, nor any legal requirement, for a browser like these apps to be held responsible for the million possible bits of content it could consume.
The app is not the service.
The fediverse is very split, you have some servers that are run by people who post straight up Nazi symbolism on their admin accounts, and you have some servers that have admins who will happily participate in piling on someone for appearing Insufficiently Woke. I block both kinds on my server because I just want a nice quiet place to talk with my friends, and that's a definite segment of the Fediverse too.
This much is key to observe: this isn't a partisan maneuver by Google, as much as people may want to slot it into that. It smells much more like a control maneuver: a perceived competitor.
A competitor to what? G+?
To the big tech cartel, period. Don't think for one second that Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Adobe, and their friends aren't having one big handshake party over this kind of crap.
Really? It's not okay to say it's censorship when it is? I'll admit I'm wrong iff the apps are reinstated without having to impose additional restrictions.
There is a specific exception to web browsers, so Mastodon app(s) could probably classify as one by prominently displaying the web url of a post above the post.
:) I wonder how this fits into the Chromium team's insistence that URLs are user-unfriendly and that browsers ought to redesign them?
Unless the rule these apps actually broke is that you aren't allowed to do things that go against Google's profit interests.
Where do we find the rules about exceptions? Are group communication apps excepted as well?
It's not obviously in the Restricted Content policy page: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/topi...
The rules there are extremely general, and technically cover all sorts of things which are currently let into the Store.
Vague policies are very useful when those making them wish to engage in arbitrary and capricious enforcement.
one of the problems we have in Tech (as an industry and on social media) is to allow individuals who make poor and bad decisions to hide behind the collective of a company/organization. And we continue applauding them for their great work they do in areas that are removed from the political. But these days innovation acts as a shield where we let the innovators get away and reap praise as individuals (the inventors of golang, the teams who standardized QUIC, the guys doing netflix propaganda about their simian-devops-army, facebooks React, Amazon's DSSTNE...) all of them have engineers who wear these things like a badge and are proud to give talks. Yet when they are responsible for projects that violate human rights, remove the Taiwanese flags from their app, or censor speech as in this case then we're never talking about people but it's always the opaqueness of the firm that hides these abuses.
We need a list of these lizards so we know when to throw tomatoes and rotten eggs at them whenever they give a talk or share feel-good posts on LinkedIn.
people should be ashamed instead of proud when they write "disclaimer I work at X"
The tech industry is a place where people generally prefer to talk things out rather than yelling and shaming. I think that's worth protecting, even if we see short term gains that might be available from defection. After all, once Google realizes the norms have changed, won't they be able to leverage their resources to find people who yell louder and shame more frequently than you?
The old days are gone.
The old days were never as controversy-free as most people remember. There was a time not that long ago when common techie opinions like "Internet piracy isn't a big deal" or "shooter games are fun and kid-friendly" were seen as quite immoral in some circles, and calling your forum "Hacker News" was kinda subversive. If we're headed back to that kind of environment, just with a different set of moral issues enforced by a different set of people, that seems solidly OK.
When the hell has that /not/ been the case in society? Institutions have always been shields and your dehumanization and desire for shaming ironically shows exactly why they serve that function - they don't want to be subject to the whims of random mobs who aren't a part of them.
I prefer the term "hated speech" since it's in the eye of the beholder.
That's needlessly confusing. Half the posts on https://www.reddit.com/r/TIHI/ are "hated speech" while being miles away from anything that would get called hate speech.
Don't forget twitter & facebook, but they won't because that's not really the reason.
Guess they should ban Chrome, since hate speech appears on the web. All these Fediverse things can be accessed via web apps and progressive web apps (PWAs) too.
Following that logic, they should also remove Google search.
You don't even have to go that far because you can just find plenty on Twitter.
> Firefox
Don't give Google ideas.
Not even web browsers, Twitter should go first
And they'd replace it with a special browser that limits to the amp-enabled sites only. This is so obvious.
It's pretty rich that Google claims to be removing these apps for hate speech when their own search engine returns results from sites like Kiwi Farms and Encyclopedia Dramatica on their victims so prominently.
(throwaway since the former name searches themselves to find new targets.)
They wouldn't be doing this unless they had serious reason to do so. They aren't dumb, they know everyone is looking.
The far more likely reason is that they know we have an issue. They've been monitoring and they don't like what they've been hearing.
They should also ban chat apps because you never know, someone may one day say something that Google does not agree with. lets be on the safe side.
Hate speech is bad.
Censorship is much worse.
Or, might Chrome start censoring...
If this is the Google policy they may want to bake that policy into the way Chrome operates.
What do you think AMP is a prelude to?
That's coming soon enough.
Why not just get rid of that troublesome feature called the internet?
You joke about that, but I wouldn’t be surprised if in 5 years (or maybe 1 year?) open browsers are banned and only “allowed” browsers are used that allow access to “allowed” websites and content.
Finally, the killer app for mesh networks.
Why not go all the way and just ban all ISPs?
That actually might be an improvement over the current situation.
Twitter is literally a platform for hate speech right now, and people have been killed because of it. Will they be taking down Twitter?
I really hope they do.
Cool. So if the issue is hate speech I'll be waiting for Google to ban the FB app as well
Goggle doesn't protect users, they oppress wrongthinkers. Moderation of facebook is delegated to facebook.
Don't forget Twitter and Facebook. Twitter/Facebook basically created hate speech, by the way.