> Forget Google, does a person with a personal website that allows comments get to control what comments they want displayed on their site or not? Does that person get to choose what work they want to accept from a potential customer?
Why would you ever want to ignore Google in this situation? Unless you don't want to earnestly debate the real topic?
Their size, control, and the fact they run massive platforms for publishers to post content, whose consumers often can post their own content, with multiple centrally controlled areas for control for hundreds of millions of people at any moment, makes it pointless to ignore such important context and semantics.
Debating the role of these major gatekeepers at a cultural, rational, and moral level - in the context of the position which they actually hold in society - is an entirely valid, and essential to any useful arguments.
Just because there are some weak analogies to governmental constitutions, or small business's/independent publisher's/individuals website's freedom to choose what people post directly on their site/app, doesn't mean it's a useful position to judge what self-imposed limitations should be employed by major monopolistic companies who run entire portions of the internet.
Great power requires great responsibility.
The difference here is basic common sense.
The fact people keep resorting to these reductionist analogies, ignoring critical context and arguing from positions of fundamentally different levels of power/responsibility, in order to push some pro-censorship and expansive moderation of speech, shows the weakness in these arguments.
If you need to ignore significant amounts of context to make your points then you're being deceitful, whether intentionally or not.
I'd go even further to argue this intentional ignorance of context and semantics is a fundamental tactic used by pro-censorship activists - despite the fact context and intention are fundamental to almost all human communication, verbal or otherwise.
At a more local level it's commonplace for these activists to ignore the obvious intention and context of the speaker, and critically the tastes and tolerances of the specific audience itself - who are entirely voluntary consumers. Making whole words, phrases, and concepts totally off limits, regardless if it was used in intentionally and rationally derogatory or offensive ways.
It's basically intentionally missing the forest for the trees. All for some vague greater good. No matter how many false-positives, unintended side-effects, misunderstandings, or wasteful side-shows it creates.
