4 ms·

How do you know 'google takes election stuff seriously'? Causation!=effect. TBH I'm surprised the OP even asked the question 'why did an algorithm remove my stu

How do you know 'google takes election stuff seriously'? Causation!=effect. TBH I'm surprised the OP even asked the question 'why did an algorithm remove my stuff?'. No google employee is going to tell you (even if they knew, which is quite doubtful given the complexities of machine learning). If you sign up for a service which is machine-managed, you are subject to the whims of the machine. Occams razor suggests it is unlikely there is a conspiracy, or malice at play. The machine is just doing its job for its masters, possibly badly, possibly not, but the general populace will never know one way or the other.

TIPSIO 4y ago
You're right, I don't. Just assuming based on my personal experience and a strange event.
sam0x17 4y ago
I can provide another datapoint. When I was at Arist (YC S20) we experienced tons of content filtering at the carrier level around election time. Messages that merely mentioned the word "vote" or "election" were getting blocked by many carriers. A few months later none of these restrictions seemed to exist. So not just Google.
- raarts 4y ago
  Carrier level? If this is true this should be national news.
  - sam0x17 4y ago
    Oh yeah carriers regularly filter based on content. I've posted about it extensively on HN before. I only have line-of-sight into them doing this for SMS messages arriving from businesses i.e. via Twilio, Telgorithm, Bandwidth, etc. I don't know one way or the other whether they also do this for regular SMS messages but I imagine automated 10DLC are under more scrutiny than a regular SMS user. The filtering is phrase and word based generally, but sometimes also seems to use an ML model. We were able to use our own ML analysis to figure out the exact words causing content blocking and which carriers in a lot of scenarios. But yeah, it's definitely a thing at every major carrier.

TIPSIO 4y ago

You're right, I don't. Just assuming based on my personal experience and a strange event.

sam0x17 4y ago

I can provide another datapoint. When I was at Arist (YC S20) we experienced tons of content filtering at the carrier level around election time. Messages that merely mentioned the word "vote" or "election" were getting blocked by many carriers. A few months later none of these restrictions seemed to exist. So not just Google.

raarts 4y ago
Carrier level? If this is true this should be national news.
- sam0x17 4y ago
  Oh yeah carriers regularly filter based on content. I've posted about it extensively on HN before. I only have line-of-sight into them doing this for SMS messages arriving from businesses i.e. via Twilio, Telgorithm, Bandwidth, etc. I don't know one way or the other whether they also do this for regular SMS messages but I imagine automated 10DLC are under more scrutiny than a regular SMS user. The filtering is phrase and word based generally, but sometimes also seems to use an ML model. We were able to use our own ML analysis to figure out the exact words causing content blocking and which carriers in a lot of scenarios. But yeah, it's definitely a thing at every major carrier.