After Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California pressured its general counsel at a hearing, Google de-ranked the Russian state media enterprise RT in its search results. As a private company, Google would have been within its rights to arrive at such a decision for reasons of its own. But for it to do so in response to government pressure, as appears to have happened here, poses very real First Amendment problems [John Samples, Cato]
2 Comments
I truly hope that Google’s decision was an internal, independent decision and not pressured by the government. I believe it was the right decision, but the process must be right as well.
That would be very difficult to believe when multiple government officials were very publicly threatening Google with some form of consequences if the didn’t do it.