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0 pointsrurp4y ago0 comments

I believe those are weakly held beliefs relative to their strongly held belief of making piles of money. Despite the lip service Google and others haven't exactly been going out of their way to help improve democracy and institutions in recent years.

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adventured4y ago· 1 in thread

What piles of money? Russia is an entirely irrelevant source of income for them.

And if that were true, they would not have de-platformed Trump and they wouldn't take down lots of other high traffic content (eg anti vax) that they do.

Russia has a mediocre economy, mediocre median standard of living, mediocre consumer economy, zero economic growth for a decade, and a disaster of a future economically going forward.

US big tech all by itself generates more surplus cash (capital available for saving after expenses) every year than the entire nation of Russia does.

Russia is an economic weakling and provides no great allure for big tech.

rurpOP4y ago

I don't mean that these companies are literally shilling for Russia directly. Rather it's that their entire approach is based around maximizing revenue, regardless of the consequences.

Deferring all decisions to an opaque algorithm isn't the most responsible approach, it's just the cheapest. Worrying about externalities of their services costs money and produces little, so they mostly don't.

The fact that their approach can be used to help horrendous warmongers is not intentional, but maintaining a system that can be used in that way is.

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