Google’s new gaming platform comes with a big hitch — more censorship.
Google has announced the launch of Stadia, a new streaming service that will allow people to pay to play a wide selection of games online. The goal is to have it become the gaming equivalent of Netflix.
Only Google wants Stadia to become a gaming safe space. As CNET observed “Google wants to prevent its new Stadia from filling up with racists, bigots and trolls who congregate online.”
Tech platforms have been heavily criticized by the left for not doing more to restrict speech they find offensive online, while conservatives have been hammering them for cracking down on freedom of speech and debate.
CNET spoke with Phil Harrison, the Google employee who currently runs Stadia about his commitment to “keeping abusive activity off the service.” He acknowledged that he offered few specifications on how this would be carried out.
Harrison admitted that he wishes "we could make some grand proclamation that it's going to go away," then acknowledged that "I don't think that is true." Then came the talk of censorship where he stated that he thinks Stadia can “marginalize” speech it finds offensive “to a large degree.” He acknowledge that many gamers are not politically correct liberals and “enjoy that type of communication.”
He specifically professed that the anti-PC crowd is “not what we want to associate with as a platform.” adding that “we will do everything we can to find it and insulated from the rest of what our platform is. There's clearly some things that we can lean on from the rest of Google that will help us.”
Google has a checkered history when it comes to censorship and bias. It worked with the far-left “Anti-Defamation League.” The ADL’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt claims he worked with “Google and Google AI” to try to “interrupt cyber hate before it happens.” His definition of hate includes words such as “caravan” and “open borders,” which he labels as “white supremacist phrases.” Google’s own employees share a similarly absurd standard of hatred, with more than 100 of its employees enraged at the usage of the word ”family” in a memo, which they saw as “deeply homophobic.”
When Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified before Congress, he was grilled by GOP representatives over his company’s biases. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) in particular roasted Pichai over an election scandal exposed by a leaked memo. Eliana Murillo, Google’s head of multicultural marketing, claimed to have worked with organizations to mobilize Latino votes “in key states” as well as paid for rides to the polls. On the other hand Google remains fine with a Saudi app that allowed men to track their wives and prevent them from fleeing the country.
