Google’s Gatekeepers - The New York Times. After having many of the videos translated into English, Wong and her colleagues set out to determine which ones were, in fact, illegal in Turkey; which violated You. Tube’s terms of service prohibiting hate speech but allowing political speech; and which constituted expression that Google and You. Critics Consensus: Strikingly stark, brutally honest, and rivetingly assembled, The Gatekeepers offers essential perspective on a seemingly intractable war from some. The latest innovations in comfort and convenience GATEKEEPERS, INC. Meeting all your needs in Access Control Systems and Gate Operators with the. Gatekeeper definition, a person in charge of a gate, usually to identify, count, supervise, etc., the traffic or flow through it. The Gatekeepers (Hebrew: Tube would try to protect. There was a vigorous internal debate among Wong and her colleagues at the top of Google’s legal pyramid. Andrew Mc. Laughlin, Google’s director of global public policy, took an aggressive civil- libertarian position, arguing that the company should protect as much speech as possible. Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel, took a more pragmatic approach, expressing concern for the safety of the dozen or so employees at Google’s Turkish office. The responsibility for balancing these and other competing concerns about the controversial content fell to Wong, whose colleagues jokingly call her “the Decider,” after George W. Bush’s folksy self- description. Wong decided that Google, by using a technique called I. P. For a time, her solution seemed to satisfy the Turkish judges, who restored You. Tube access. But last June, as part of a campaign against threats to symbols of Turkish secularism, a Turkish prosecutor made a sweeping demand: that Google block access to the offending videos throughout the world, to protect the rights and sensitivities of Turks living outside the country. Google refused, arguing that one nation’s government shouldn’t be able to set the limits of speech for Internet users worldwide. Unmoved, the Turkish government today continues to block access to You. Tube in Turkey. THE ONGOING DISPUTE between Google and Turkey reminds us that, throughout history, the development of new media technologies has always altered the way we think about threats to free speech. At the beginning of the 2. America worried most about the danger of the government silencing political speech: think of Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate for President, who was imprisoned in 1. American involvement during World War I. But by the late 1. Supreme Court started to protect unpopular speakers more consistently, some critics worried that free speech in America was threatened less by government suppression than by editorial decisions made by the handful of private mass- media corporations like NBC and CBS that disproportionately controlled public discourse. One legal scholar, Jerome Barron, even argued at the time that the courts should give unorthodox speakers a mandatory right of access to media outlets controlled by giant corporations. Today the Web might seem like a free- speech panacea: it has given anyone with Internet access the potential to reach a global audience. But though technology enthusiasts often celebrate the raucous explosion of Web speech, there is less focus on how the Internet is actually regulated, and by whom. As more and more speech migrates online, to blogs and social- networking sites and the like, the ultimate power to decide who has an opportunity to be heard, and what we may say, lies increasingly with Internet service providers, search engines and other Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook and even e.
the Gatekeepers (2012 Film)
1/10/17 The Gatekeepers Team (Joey & Vic) Replay Link 245min. 1/3/17 The Gatekeepers Team. Get the latest New York news, weather, traffic, entertainment and health. Get local NY news, NYC breaking news, and national news from NBC New York. Bay. Photo. The G Team: Nicole Wong, the “Decider”; Andrew Mc. Laughlin, global public- policy director; and Kent Walker, general counsel. Credit. Jason Madara for The New York Times The most powerful and protean of these Internet gatekeepers is, of course, Google. With control of 6. Internet searches, as well as ownership of You. Gatekeepers In MediaTube, Google has enormous influence over who can find an audience on the Web around the world. As an acknowledgment of its power, Google has given Nicole Wong a central role in the company’s decision- making process about what controversial user- generated content goes down or stays up on You. Tube and other applications owned by Google, including Blogger, the blog site; Picasa, the photo- sharing site; and Orkut, the social networking site. Wong and her colleagues also oversee Google’s search engine: they decide what controversial material does and doesn’t appear on the local search engines that Google maintains in many countries in the world, as well as on Google. As a result, Wong and her colleagues arguably have more influence over the contours of online expression than anyone else on the planet. In response to the rise of online gatekeepers like Wong, some House Democrats and Republicans have introduced a bipartisan bill called the Global Online Freedom Act, which would require that Internet companies disclose to a newly created office in the State Department all material filtered in response to demands by foreign governments. Google and other leading Internet companies have sought modifications to the bill, arguing that, without the flexibility to negotiate (as Wong did with Turkey), they can’t protect the safety of local employees and that they may get kicked out of repressive countries, where they believe even a restricted version of their services does more good than harm. For the past two years, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, along with other international Internet companies, have been meeting regularly with human rights and civil- liberties advocacy groups to agree on voluntary standards for resisting worldwide censorship requests. At the end of last month, the Internet companies and the advocacy groups announced the Global Network Initiative, a series of principles for protecting global free expression and privacy. Voluntary self- regulation means that, for the foreseeable future, Wong and her colleagues will continue to exercise extraordinary power over global speech online. Which raises a perennial but increasingly urgent question: Can we trust a corporation to be good — even a corporation whose informal motto is “Don’t be evil”?“To love Google, you have to be a little bit of a monarchist, you have to have faith in the way people traditionally felt about the king,” Tim Wu, a Columbia law professor and a former scholar in residence at Google, told me recently. After all, it’s hard to be a company whose mission is to give people all the information they want and to insist at the same time on deciding what information they get. THE HEADQUARTERS OF YOUTUBE are in a former Gap building in San Bruno, Calif., just a few miles from the San Francisco International Airport. In the lobby, looming over massage chairs, giant plasma- screen TVs show popular videos and scroll news stories related to You. Tube. The day I arrived to interview the You. Tube management about how the site regulates controversial speech, most of the headlines, as it happens, had to do with precisely that topic. Two teenagers who posted a video of themselves throwing a soft drink at a Taco Bell employee were ordered by a Florida judge to post an apology on You. Tube. The British culture secretary had just called on You. Tube to carry warnings on clips that contain foul language. The volume of videos posted on You. Tube is formidable — Google estimates that something like 1. You. Tube users can flag a video if they think it violates You. Tube’s community guidelines, which prohibit sexually explicit videos, graphic violence and hate speech. Once flagged, a video is vetted by You. Tube’s internal reviewers at facilities around the world who decide whether to take it down, leave it up or send it up the You. Tube hierarchy for more specialized review. When I spoke with Micah Schaffer, a You. Tube policy analyst, he refused to say how many reviewers the company employs. But I was allowed to walk around the office to see if I could spot any of them. I passed one 2. 0- something You. Tube employee after another — all sitting in cubicles and wearing the same unofficial uniform of T- shirt and jeans. The internal reviewers were identifiable, I was told, only by the snippets of porn flickering on their laptops. The idea of a 2. 0- something with a laptop in San Bruno (or anywhere else, for that matter) interpreting community guidelines for tens of millions of users might not instill faith in You. Tube’s vetting process. But the most controversial user flags or requests from foreign governments make their way up the chain of command to the headquarters of Google, in Mountain View, Calif., where they may ultimately be reviewed by Wong, Mc. Laughlin and Walker. Recently, I spent several days talking to Wong and her colleagues at the so- called Googleplex, which has the feeling of a bucolic and extraordinarily well- financed theme camp. As we sat around a conference table, they told me about their debates as they wrestled with hard cases like the dispute in Turkey, as well as the experiences that have informed their thinking about free speech. Walker, the general counsel, wrote for The Harvard Crimson as an undergraduate and considered becoming a journalist before going into law; Mc. Laughlin, the head of global public policy, became a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society after working on the successful Supreme Court challenge to part of the federal Communications Decency Act. And Wong, a soft- spoken and extremely well organized woman, has a joint degree in law and journalism from Berkeley and told me she aspired to be a journalist as a child because of her aunt, a reporter for The Los Angeles Times. Photo. Thailand. Credit. Siggi Eggertsson I asked Wong what was the best analogy for her role at Google. Was she acting like a judge? I’m taking my best guess at what will allow our products to move forward in a country, and that’s not a judge role, more an enabling role.” She stressed the importance for Google of bringing its own open culture to foreign countries while still taking into account local laws, customs and attitudes. This began to change in 2. French Jew surfed a Yahoo auction site to look for collections of Nazi memorabilia, which violated a French law banning the sale and display of anything that incites racism.
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