Who are ‘Good Censors’ on internet

When talking among themselves, Silicon Valley big shots sometimes say weird things. In an internal presentation in March 2018, Google executives were asked to imagine their company acting as a “Good Censor,” in order to limit
the impact of users “behaving badly.”
In a 2016 internal video, Nick Foster, Google’s head of design, envisioned a “goal-driven ledger” of all users’ data, endowed with its own “volition or purpose,” which would nudge us to take decisions (say, about shopping or travel) that would “reflect Google’s values as an organisation.”
If that doesn’t strike you as weird — like dialogue from some dystopian science-fiction novel — then you need to read more dystopian science fiction. (Start with Yevgeny Zamyatin’s astonishingly prescient “We.”)
The lowliest employees of big tech companies — the content moderators whose job it is to spot bad stuff online — offer a rather different perspective.
I don’t know if, as the New York Post alleged, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden met with a Ukrainian energy executive named Vadym Pozharskyi in 2015. I don’t know if Biden’s son Hunter tried to broker such a meeting as part of his board directorship deal with Pozharskyi’s firm, Burisma Holdings.
What I do know is that if I read the story online and found it compelling, I should have been able to share it with friends. Instead, both Facebook and Twitter made a decision to try to kill the Post’s scoop.
In May, Twitter attached a health warning to one of President Trump’s Tweets. There was uproar at Facebook when chief executive Mark Zuckerberg declined to follow Twitter’s lead. Days later, Facebook was pressured into taking down 88 Trump campaign ads that used an inverted red triangle to attack antifa, the far-left movement.

—Bloomberg