Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google, has backed a “hate-speech spell-checker” that would nudge ordinary web users away from unwelcome forms of expression on social media.
Just what we need. Another leftist corporate do-gooder doing Obama’s bidding, telling us what we may think, and what we may not think.
How benevolent, sophisticated and reassuring. Thinking for yourself? Who needs it?
Google is supposed to be a private, for-profit company. The central purpose of a private, for-profit company is to please customers, and in the process make a big profit.
If customers want and demand a “hate-speech-spell-checker,” then I’m all for Google providing this for its motivated customers. It’s a stupid idea, and a worthless product, in my view; but it’s up to a private company to decide how to best please its customers.
Yet I find myself wondering: What kind of customers would want or demand such a thing? Who in the world would pay money for this? Or approve of it so much that they’d be more likely to use Google as a search engine, email provider, or anything else?
I smell a quest for control.
Writing in the New York Times, Schmidt said that it was important to use the web’s power of connectivity to “bring out the best in people.” While he acknowledged the positives of the Internet, such as its role as a platform for the “raw reality of oppressed people and their real needs,” he added that the web is “also allowing some of our worst traits – such as envy, oppression, and hate – to come into full view as well.”
Now let me get this straight. The great majority of us are so filled with envy, oppressiveness and hatred, that we need a web tool to help us control ourselves.
I’m against envy. But I consider it envy when government declares a class war on “the rich” and proceeds to confiscate or transfer wealth in name of the “common good.”
Is it considered hate speech to be an Obama supporter, or a socialist? I somehow doubt it. How about if you support Donald Trump? Or Ted Cruz? Or, better yet, Ayn Rand’s ideas? Who, and in what way and for what reasons, will be filtered out as “hateful” and who will not?
And more: why would hateful, envious and otherwise oppressive individuals go anywhere near such a tool?
I highly suspect we’re not talking about something market-oriented or voluntary. We’re talking about something required by force. Or snuck in by government stealth, making it a “voluntary” requirement by Google in exchange for government agreeing not to censor online conversations—for now.
Schmidt did not go into specifics of what such spell-checking technology would look like, but as head of Google — and, by extension, YouTube — Schmidt has more power than any individual, save perhaps Mark Zuckerberg, to enact his vision of a new Internet.
Well, yes and no. If Google were a completely private company operating in a fully free market, then it would possess no power at all, other than that created by willing customers.
However, we all know that there are no totally private companies in America, at least not big ones. Once you become big in America, you become more subject than ever to the whims, preferences and even explicit demands and requirements of government authorities. Once you make a billion dollars, you had better be politically correct … or watch out.
Under Obama’s administration, this is truer than ever. His own Attorney General, for example, has resolved to legally go after anyone who criticizes Islam. And we’re well aware of the IRS scandal in which anti-Obama Tea Party groups were given unfavorable treatment by the auditors.
This is the same kind of thing. Google is operating at the behest of government authorities; not to please customers. No customers would ever want or need a “hate-speech-spell-checker.” Not if they’re rational, because they’d find it stupid, wasteful and insulting; and not if they’re irrational and hateful, because they’d want no part of a program designed to curb these qualities.
It’s also unclear what Schmidt means by “hate and harassment.” The former CEO of Twitter, Dick Costolo, once expressed surprise at the number of people who came to him with complaints of “harassment” on the platform that were in fact mere political disagreements.
If you’ve ever tried to discuss or argue political disagreements with an Obama supporter, you will get the point completely. You’re either met with tears, anger, expressions of fear/rage, accusations of racism, or threats of retribution. Rarely, if ever, will you hear calm, cogent or intelligent questions.
That’s all advocates of this p.c. nonsense people have. And it makes sense. Obama’s politics—like socialism or authoritarianism more generally—are all about coercion, control and submission. No wonder they sympathize with Islam. Islam is also about making people who disagree with them submit. Leftist progressives and militant Muslims are a lot alike.
Obama’s policies—and Hillary Clinton’s will be the same—are all about submission. Their God is not Allah; their God is government. Their means of compliance is blind obedience, enforced at gunpoint. They merely get politically connected companies like Google to do their dirty work for them.
The rest of us would do well to speak out and fight against what’s happening. Let’s nip this in the bud before the Attorney General shuts down all dissension.
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