New Delhi, February 25 – Coming from a company that claims its mission is to free all the information in the world, this is one strange diktat. Google, which is arguably the most influential technology firm because of how it controls what we see on the web, has now asked users of Blogger not to post explicit content on the blogs.
Blogger, incidentally, is one of the world’s most used blogging services. The move is clearly aimed at people who put pornography content on their blogs. In a grand proclamation Google says that from March 23, all the blogs hosting explicit content will be forced to turn private.
This means they will be accessible only to blog administrator(s) and blog owner. Meanwhile, all the blogs that put explicit content on their pages after March 23 will have the risk of getting blocked or removed by the almighty Google!
Wow, talk about a company holding power over what millions and millions of users can put on their personal websites! This is incredulous. And extremely disturbing. There is no doubt that majority of web users are not particularly fond of pornography.
Though, it is also true that probably there is not even a single web users who has not come across pornography, intentionally or unintentionally.
But even if majority of web users don’t like something, it is an extremely draconian move on the part of a company to ban legally-allowed content from its platform, especially when this platform happens to be the one used by millions and millions of users.
When Google started way back in late 90s, one of the guiding principles for the company has been its neutrality. It said that it is a search engine provider that just connects users to information.
It doesn’t host the information and whether the information is good or bad is something that law and users have to decide. It doesn’t act as the moral police. The same idea was extended to other Google services like Blogger when Google took control of them.
But now, when the company plays a central role in the lives of anyone even remotely connected to the virtual world, it has started donning the hat of a moral cop. It is true that Blogger is its private platform.
But such platforms have until now been operated with an idea that these are open platforms and they allow users all the free that is afforded to them by law. This means if pornography is not illegal, it can be shared on the blogs.
Albeit, to make sure that someone doesn’t get fired for accidentally watching nude images hosted on a blog, most of the times access to these sites require explicit consent.
This consent means clicking a button that says you agree to watch adult content and that it is legal in your country region for you to watch adult content. But what Google is proposing now is entirely different. It is no longer playing the role of a mere platform provider.
It is playing the role of cop, judge and executioner and it is making its own laws. It is asking users to act and behave in a certain way. Unfortunately, though this is not without a precedent.
Technology companies, which have grown so big partly because they promised people a fair and open platform, are suddenly acting as moral police. Apple doesn’t allow pornographic or explicit content in the apps submitted for approval in iOS store.
In fact, the company’s policies around nudity and controversial content are so strict that even the regular content such as political cartoons have been banned within iOS apps. Then, there is Facebook that has an extremely regressive content policy. It doesn’t even allow photos of mothers breastfeeding their children.
The sad bit about all this is that technology companies claim to facilitate free flow of information. For example Google, when it is convenient for it, likes to take a position that it doesn’t control content on its platforms and that users are allowed everything that the law of the land permits.
But the latest Blogger incident shows it is not true anymore. For a company that built its empire with motto “do no evil”, Google is surely changing the definition of evil pretty fast nowadays.
-INDIA TODAY
