I understand Google’s position and how they got there. Yet it true that the company does, in the end, hide things, like Duranty, on behalf of the government. One difference is the scale — the Government purges, versus, say, crackdowns on peasants or memories of Tianamen. But the basic facts: hiding information pursuant to request, are similar. Maybe another difference is that people assumed Duranty was telling the truth, and they don’t assume that of a search engine.

The whole question is whether you think search engines have ethical duties like journalists — I guess we don’t know the answer.

It seems to me there’s a difference in moral standing between someone who, in service of his political ideals, chooses to lie to conceal the murder of 40,000,000 people, and someone who, under legal duress, reveals the identity of a handful of dissidents who are then jailed. If these two actions seem similar to you, perhaps you need to recalibrate your perceptions.

In the USA, a results page for a search for ‘china’ has this at the top.
>Results 1 – 10 of about 2,070,000,000 for china [definition]. (0.22 seconds)

In China, it could just look like this:
>Results 1 – 10 of about 322 pages approved by censors (out of 2,070,000,000) for china [definition]. (0.22 seconds)

Kind of like current American media soft-pedals the news, relying on official sources and subject to significant editorial censorship?

So you missed the most important point – what was Duranty’s hairstyle?