alt Hacker NewsIt doesn't even have to be censorship of speech.
If you are wrongly charged a significant amount by either Google or Apple and their service is of no help, what would you do?
Most people would weigh the options, then just eat the cost than anger them with a chargeback and lose their email/phone access. That's self-censorship financially too.
What if Google reinstates their old G+ and YouTube real name policy for its accounts. We would protest but give them the proof grudgingly and it can position itself as one of the core part of online ID verification push currently going on.
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> What if Google reinstates their old G+ and YouTube real name policy for its accounts.
G+ was a failure; people refused to provide real names. Even Facebook's "real name policy" wasn't (and still isn't AFAIK) enforced at all. At one point, I had multiple phantom Google and Facebook accounts. Now I just self-host and eschew social media.
I was in that situation a few years ago. I started a hemp related business in 2019 and Ad Sense didn't like my ads and gave me an error message saying I couldn't run my ads because of certain keywords being banned. I forgot about it until a couple of years later when I saw a $300 charge on my credit card bill. Google changed their policy as CBD/hemp had become more mainstream and started running my ads. By this time my business had already failed so I did not want those ads running. I couldn't figure out how to contact a human, so I ended up just paying because I didn't want to risk getting my account closed.