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posted by martyb on Saturday September 02 2017, @02:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-be-evil dept.

Following a controversy over Google's Eric Schmidt pressuring the New America Foundation into removing a critical blog post and firing the scholar who wrote it, a former Forbes journalist now working at Gizmodo has written about an incident in which Google allegedly pressured Forbes to kill a negative story:

The incident occurred in 2011. Hill was a cub reporter at Forbes, where she covered technology and privacy. At the time, Google was actively promoting Google Plus and was sending representatives to media organizations to encourage them to add "+1" buttons to their sites. Hill was pulled into one of these meetings, where the Google representative suggested that Forbes would be penalized in Google search results if it didn't add +1 buttons to the site.

Hill thought that seemed like a big story, so she contacted Google's PR shop for confirmation. Google essentially confirmed the story, and so Hill ran with it under the headline: "Stick Google Plus Buttons On Your Pages, Or Your Search Traffic Suffers."

Hill described what happened next:

Google never challenged the accuracy of the reporting. Instead, a Google spokesperson told me that I needed to unpublish the story because the meeting had been confidential, and the information discussed there had been subject to a non-disclosure agreement between Google and Forbes. (I had signed no such agreement, hadn't been told the meeting was confidential, and had identified myself as a journalist.)

It escalated quickly from there. I was told by my higher-ups at Forbes that Google representatives called them saying that the article was problematic and had to come down. The implication was that it might have consequences for Forbes, a troubling possibility given how much traffic came through Google searches and Google News.

If true, does it reflect worse on Google or the clickbait and scriptwall outlet Forbes?


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Hyperturtle on Saturday September 02 2017, @08:37PM

    by Hyperturtle (2824) on Saturday September 02 2017, @08:37PM (#563007)

    I thought the story was that the believed that Google was acting in terribly bad faith and abusing its monopolistic position. The NDA is just a weasely argument at this point. The NDA is indeed a non-story.

    The NDA question is not what anyone worried about Google's behavior nor Forbes behavior was concerned with -- she didn't write a story about the NDA and how stifling they are to the freedom of expression. No, whe wrote about google being evil and their saying that's a nice revenue stream you have, it'd be a shame is traffic stopped coming here so often, while two goons in the background talk about how horrible it would be if someone busted a kneecap for some reason.

    It doesn't matter if the goons were under an NDA. What the goons are insinuating, and what their employer is directly suggesting, are not exactly on the "do no evil" list of suggestions Google used to abide with.

    She was writing about such lack of goodness. This whole NDA discussion is seperate. I won't get into if an NDA that keeps illegal activities quiet by censoring the activities described is something that can turn out to be legally enforcable to gag like they did, but the goons don't care much about the law anyway.

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