Digital culture discreetly imposes deeply conservative, outdated norms on billions of technology users worldwide. What is the vehicle for this new prudishness? Dour, one-dimensional algorithms.
Except that only blacklisted words for Google Instant results, not Google itself, which I don't think is a problem. Nothing worse than having porn instantly pop up when you mistype your search (Even if people don't mistype something similar to anal too much). If Google started censoring its results after you press enter thats when it might be a problem. I say might because when your looking for porn you most likely know where to look, and a you don't need Google to find it.
An interesting article but I think there would have been better examples to draw on. For the Google example, I also think that the service would be worse if they allowed the blacklisted words to auto-populate. I would not like to be the one making judgements about what is and is not acceptable for any of those companies, let alone developing the algorithms that help automatically 'filter' content.
Why do people always see "conservative" as a bad thing :/ There's no reason to make a complete joke of someone else's worldview just because you disagree with it. It's also silly to assume two companies (Facebook and Google) represent the entirety of silicon valley. I do have to wonder where the line is, though, just as Astral mentions in an earlier comment. People would hate for Google to allow derogatory terms like "faggot" or "nigger" through, yet get in an uproar whenever it's a sexually promiscuous term, which the article seems to focus on more. As far as copywrite... well, I think there's going to have to be a lot of change in how we deal with that, but that discussion has been beat to death any time someone mentions Samsung and Apple in the same breath.