I have 0 love for what Google is doing and turning into, but this article is deeply flawed. Their focus is implicitly on the accuracy rate of Google's actions,

I have 0 love for what Google is doing and turning into, but this article is deeply flawed. Their focus is implicitly on the accuracy rate of Google's actions, yet it makes no effort to statistically demonstrate this. What would matter is not an anecdotal incident, but estimations of the error rate of Google's algorithmic censorship/deranking/demonitization as compared to how human's might perform. Humans regularly make dumb mistakes if not out of misunderstanding then out of sloppiness. Are these algorithmic decisions more accurate, on average, than we might expect of a collection of humans along the lines of Amazon's Mechanical Turk? We can only speculate, but I'd be quite surprised if they were not, but if so that refutes this article's entire premise. This is one of the biggest problems with advertising driven media. They love anecdotal evidence because we love anecdotal evidence which means the story gets clicks and they get their ad bucks. But it entirely misses the point of issues. For instance here, should the issue be the accuracy rate of Google's behaviors or Google's behaviors themselves and their desired endgame? Their accuracy, as a whole, is almost certainly going to be quite acceptable relative to human accuracy. So consequently you end up targeting them in a spot where they're extremely well 'defended.' By contrast, I think the world Google is trying to shape is certainly not one many would particularly enjoy. And the worst part here is that there is great potential for countless longform consideration and analysis of such a world. But putting out an anecdotal bit is far easier. It's just plain lazy.