Russia to Google: Ban web sites we tell you to ban, or Russia ban you!

Sundar Pichai told Congress yesterday it has no plans to go into China with a search engine designed to cater to China’s censor-happy Communist Party.

I hope that’s true.

And if it is true, he might as well not even bother looking at Russia, because the Russians are making it clear Google will not be welcome there unless it’s even more shameless about catering to the censorship stylings of one Vladimir Putin:

Russian officials have threatened to block Google’s access in Russia unless it complies with a law that asks it to ban certain websites.

The Vladimir Putin-led country is putting intense pressure on internet companies to block content it deems harmful after passing a law in September that required search engines to comply with the state registry of banned websites and omit the banned content from search results.

TRENDING: Trump Gets Rousing Response from Supporters as He Returns to Florida

While the registry does contain websites promoting hate speech and self-harm it also includes a plethora of websites blacklisted for explicitly political reasons, such as a Ukrainian news website.

Russian news agencies on Wednesday quoted deputy Communications Oversight Agency chief Vitaly Subbotin as saying that authorities may push for amendments that would let them block search engines like Google if they fail to comply with Russian law.

That’s actually the funniest line in the whole story. In Russia, the authorities don’t “push for amendments.” In Russia, amendments push you!

If Putin wants Google banned, Google will be banned. It’s hysterical that left-wingers in the United States complain about their First Amendment rights when you see how freely they are allowed to say anything and everything they want, compared to what happens to the likes of Google when it tries to operate in China or Russia.

Then again, the left has its own idea about how the First Amendment should work, and we’ve seen that the Russians have learned from it.

Note from the excerpt the reference to “web sites promoting hate speech and self-harm.” Those are very vague terms. What do they mean? Pretty much whatever the Russian government wants them to mean.

Should you refuse to list sites that advocate the killing of people within a certain ethnicity? Or that advocate you commit suicide? Most would probably say yes.

But what about sites that defend the biblical definition of marriage? Many on the secular left now call that “hate speech” as well. What about those who question the wisdom of using psychotropic drugs? That could be called “advocacy of self-harm,” even though it is absolutely the opposite in the minds of those putting forth this point of view.

This is how the Russians censor content while pretending they are not. They can pretty much put anything they want into these categories, up to and including Ukrainian news sites, and no one can do anything about it because Russia is not a free country and does not have a democratic government.

RELATED: This Isn't About Trump: Big Tech Went from Temporary POTUS Suspension to Delisting Parler

The American left is pursuing censorship in much the same way. It doesn’t use the authority of government, but rather it uses pressure and intimidation to terrify everyone one who disseminates information. Don’t you dare put anything out there that the left considers hateful or offensive, or you will come under so much pressure you’ll decide it’s not worth the trouble. And how does the left define hateful and offensive? Simple. If the left doesn’t agree with it, it’s hateful and offensive.

This brings us back to Google. Google will probably not operate in Russia or China because it doesn’t want to be seen as agreeing to such restrictions by the governments of those countries. But in the United States, Google essentially allows the cultural left to turn it into the same type of censorship engine, simply by employing so much leftists and empowering them to make day-to-day decisions about what’s acceptable and what isn’t.

As we noted earlier this morning, House Republicans had an opportunity to corner Google’s CEO on these matters and largely blew it. We know from what’s happened in Russia and China that Google is sensitive to the idea that they would get in bed with such bald-faced government censors. Now our government has to figure out how to better demonstrate that, in America, Google does the work of cultural censors all too willingly.