10 Policy Brief No. 45 Toda Peace Institute pressure. An article by Russell Brandom in The Verge notes that in 2018, a coalition of nonprofit groups came together to create the “Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation,” and Youtube’s long-standing policies were closer to complying with the principles than Facebook’s. Examples like these may argue for the impact of different company cultures. Again, though, the companies have similar business models, so it could also be argued that the tech giants are more similar than they are different. Youtube certainly has some of the same problems and has taken many of the same actions as Facebook, including deplatforming and demonetisation. Along with other “recommendation engines” like Pinterest, Youtube has been particularly criticised for failing to moderate what is going viral in its automated recommendation systems. A 2018 article (and mantra), “Free Speech Is Not The Same as Free Reach,” is one of many relevant pieces by Renee DiResta in Wired magazine. Around the same time, Zeynep Tufceki dubbed Youtube “The Great Radicalizer” in a New York Times op-ed. Youtube recently announced that they are changing their recommendation algorithm in response to these criticisms. In some sense Google, too, can “deplatform” websites from its search results, although the word means something different with Google because the search engine almost never hosts content. If Google chooses not to offer a search result, that website still exists and can be accessed directly, whereas when Youtube or Facebook deplatforms content, the content cannot be accessed directly (though it might be re-uploaded by someone else). Hence, a better verb for Google removing websites from search results might be “deindex.” Google uses multiple forms of deindexing. Firstly, it can fully deindex a result: For instance, Google normally removes porn from search results entirely (unless the user turns off Google’s SafeSearch feature), and it also removes search results if it receives notice that those results violate copyright. Secondly, it can deindex the result from its Autocomplete feature. Autocomplete normally activates when users are typing a search query, but Google’s policy states that it does not show predictive text related to hate speech or violence (including self-harm). Thirdly, Google can impose penalties. For instance, a “-50 search penalty” moves a website 50 slots in search results — so if it normally would be the third result in a given search, instead it becomes the 53rd result. (The marketing website SearchEngineLand offers a guide to these sorts of penalties and how they are levied.) Usually, these penalties are issued due to technical problems with the website, or because the website’s creators tried to game Google’s search algorithm in violation of Google’s policies. Google penalties seem rarely used, if at all, for concerns related to the content itself, like extremism or false news. However, there has been an uptick in full deindexing on other platforms based on these concerns. In early 2019, Christina Caron at the New York Times reported that Pinterest has deindexed vaccine-related content in response to anti-vaccine activists. Although Google has not taken the same approach, it is worth understanding that Google has these capacities, and also has pre-existing policies for using them. To return to the Facebook comparison, a bigger difference between Google and Facebook is