Google, a company which operates in more than 50 countries which managed to take almost every country by storm somehow failed in China. China, on the other hand, which was known to be a copycat economy and in some aspects still is, has become a leader in artificial intelligence research with more academic papers published in Chinese than any other language. And that's not all the country is pumping money into the creation of new human species, and the eradication of disease and suffering, which for some might raise.
Ethical and moral concerns, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. O let's find out how Google failed in China.
Google launched its search engine in China in 2006. The iPhone did not yet exist, nor did any Android based smartphones. Google was about 1/5 as large and valuable as it is today, and China was known for its knockoff products. Ironically, the company, which defined itself by the motto don't be evil, agreed to censor the search results to get into China. However, Google believed that even with a censored product, they would still be able to nudge the Chinese Internet towards greater openness to accomplish this.
The first step they took was to post a notice which said that some results had been removed, which obviously Chinese regulators hated. Google had quickly become a leader amongst search engines in China by late 2009, Google controlled more than 1/3 of the Chinese search market, but soon it started experiencing a declining market. People experience excessive delays whenever they search for something. This was due to the censorship of the Internet, but it wasn't the censorship that drove out Google. It was the hack which changed everything for the company.
Chinese government officials more likely. There are people who have a loose affiliation with the Chinese government. The hacking attack, known as Operation Aurora, targeted everything from Google's intellectual property to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Google said that the attack came from within China and on 12th of January, 2010, Google announced that quote we have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on google.cn and so over the next few weeks we'll be discussing with the Chinese Government, the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all.
This was the first time when Google took a stand against the country publicly, Google soon abandoned google.cn, but the Chinese government decided to allow other operations like Gmail and Google Maps. The government believed that China and its technology sector did not need Google to succeed, and this proved to be right between 2010 and 2015. It was an explosion of new products and companies and the Internet in China bloomed hardware makers like Xiaomi started to pop up.
Older companies like Alibaba and Huawei were also growing at an exponential rate. In case you want to watch how Huawei versus Google turned out, make sure to watch this video. Coming back at the same time, the government also launched a campaign promoting entrepreneurship and innovation and soon government funded startup incubators that spread across the country. After these technological advancements, the Chinese government did not feel the need for Google. So in mid 2014 the government blocked almost all Google services like Gmail, Google Maps and Play Store in China. But as the Internet was blossoming in China, Google still wanted to do business in the country and started to find ways to circumvent the ban. In 2015, rumors swirled that Google. Was close to bringing its Google store back to China, but it never happened. Then, in 2017, rumors again swirled that Google Scholar would be allowed to operate in China. Around the same time, in 2016, Chinese censors rolled back censorship disclaimers during which searches disappeared from Chinese search engines. And in 2017, the government launched a new crackdown against VPN's, and new Advanced AI powered surveillance technologies were launched across the country, eradicating privacy of Chinese consumers.
If you look at this closely, this is happening everywhere. The difference is that most people across the world are in an illusion of privacy, but sadly this isn't the case. China directly bans foreign companies if they do not allow their strict rule, which most of the times are unjust. But at the same time people living in other parts of the world who think they have more freedom over use of Internet might be wrong. People believe that what they want to watch is what they are watching. But what if the content they are being recommended? There's an agenda which slowly shapes the way they think or simply amplify what they believe. For example, if a person has a specific ideology, algorithms of almost all social media platforms would continue to show similar content to them, which solidifies their ideology. Or if the platform has an agenda, they would recommend the content they want the person to see, and this might lead to that person never being exposed to a counterargument. Now imagine this at scale with millions of people, the idea of algorithms manipulating.
Euler's ideology, without them even knowing it, has become common. Hate speech continues to grow and the question becomes why aren't they showing the counter argument? A possible explanation would be that if they are shown counterarguments and if they don't like them, they would simply go to another platform. Thanks for reading.
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