First of all regardless for political situation this is great step in making ML research actually open. So huge thanks for those developers who pushed to make it public. Still...
Yandex is in fact share responsibility for Russian government actions. While it impossible to fight censorship they could certainly shut down their News service completely.
Yandex could also certainly move more of their company and staff out of country. It was their deliberate choice stay in Russia and getting advantages on local market by using their political weight.
Google is US company which pays taxes in US. The company just like everyone in US obviously do share responsibility for what US government does. Fortunately Google and it's leadership actually does have political positions even if you dont like it.
In any case as unfortunate owner of Russian passport with friends and collegues in Ukraine I am more affected by Putins war than by anything US does.
So I want Yandex to be seen as part of Kremlin propoganda machine and threated accordingly. This company grew monopoly in many markets in Russia and they directly benefited from Putin regime. Since Ilya Segalovich died company started to be "out of politics" and this complete lack of any political activity lead country to these terrible events.
Blatantly incorrect. Google engages in egregious political censorship all the time. Including censorship for Russian government and censorship of US anti-war voices.
Considering the importance of the topic, and provided the linked articles actually contained examples of Google censoring anti-war propaganda, I believe the swipe would have been fully justified.
Highly emotional tone changes how the data affects the reader. If he is right, I would surely better remember next time that Google is in the same ballpark due to the insult hitting hard. If he is wrong, I will know better to ignore such claims in the future without a direct quote or something else that consumes less time than reading an entire linked article.
There is a difference between "Google does not censor anti-war content" and "Google does censor anti-war content, but usually has an excuse I find acceptable".
When a company puts Jon Lennon's Merry Xmas (War is Over) behind age restriction banner[1], the question stops being "Is there censorship?" and becomes about the logic of such censorship.
>The third one was temporary until Google stopped operating in Russia altogether.
They've censored other things on behest of the Russian government for years[2]. Again, I cannot fathom how people on a tech website like HN can be unaware of such things. This is common knowledge broadly covered on mainstream websites.
Precisely zero of what you mentioned so far is censoring anti-war content.
Even in the translation case (which I assume you mean by your "excuse" remark) the original source is still available as is. I am not even sure from the description what translation team it was talking about and what does it have to do with Google exactly. "translate company text for the Russian market" this passage sounds like it talks about translating Google's own interfaces, help pages, press releases, or support articles to Russian. E.g. no external voice is being censored.
Yandex is in fact share responsibility for Russian government actions. While it impossible to fight censorship they could certainly shut down their News service completely.
Yandex could also certainly move more of their company and staff out of country. It was their deliberate choice stay in Russia and getting advantages on local market by using their political weight.