I don't get the comparison with newspapers, maybe 40 years ago that was one of the limited ways of information discovery but we've had the web since then. People are free to discover the world's information and given the saturation of that information, differing points of view on it. However, with two dominant search engines (Google and Bing/DuckDuckGo/Yahoo) there is little diversity and so censorship has more impact, at least in web discovery and navigation.
The internet is probably the biggest threat democracy has ever faced. I am ok with your romantic point of view of the informed masses but it’s a fallacy that in the end will cost us all our future. Because these people live and engage in extreme bubbles they get sucked into no matter if it’s left or right. I can only urge everyone who is for total tolerance to read K. Poppers the “Open Society and it’s Enemies” quite fitting from 1945.
Not quite sure I'm following. The "romantic point of view of the informed masses but it’s a fallacy" may apply to push techs like social media feeds more than search engines.
There aren't that many universal truths when it comes to political situations. Asking a search engine what time of day it is in Tokyo, the GDP or Ghana or whatever is entirely more objective.
I would say the onus is on people to understand sources of information and how to interpret them. If we're in a position where you're saying X% of the population will swallow what they search for, that makes search engines extremely dangerous, making the search engine an arbiter of truth is questionable. Does anyone at DDG have in depth knowledge of the political situation in Eastern Europe or what is truth and not? I would guess not, so they've no way of measuring it. It doesn't help that DDG's entire results are Bing's, who knows whether Bing is already pre-filtering them? I would guess DDG do not know that.
The point is private entity, as opposed to public state. As I stated clearly, freedom of speech is a principle applied upon public law, not private law. Therefore, "censorship" is something the state does, not something private parts do among themselves.
Are anti-spam filters "censorship"? No, because they're implemented by private citizens to benefit other private citizens.
Censorship is not just the sole domain of a government. Private entities are perfectly capable of participating in it. You're conflating two distinct ideas.
> Therefore, "censorship" is something the state does, not something private parts do among themselves.
Censorship is not defined with respect to the right of free speech; public censorship may be where those two issues collide, but it's not the only kind of censorship.
