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Multiple independent organizations inside a company each with their own rigid and inflexible operating procedures. The user to moderator ratio in the tens of th

Multiple independent organizations inside a company each with their own rigid and inflexible operating procedures. The user to moderator ratio in the tens of thousands to 1. How is this hard to see?

kahrl 4y ago
"I'm biased, I work at Google"
danpalmer 4y ago
I don't know what you mean by the multiple organizations thing – this seems to be squarely in the realm of trust and safety. And while I understand the frustration in contacting a human sometimes, in this case it seems that a human will have reviewed the content and come to the conclusion based on their training, expert opinions, policies, etc (as per the article). What can human contact add here? Excuses or reasoning for the content? Given the media attention, someone will almost certainly have reached out if there was any way that a reason or excuse could possibly change the outcome. If they didn't that implies again that there's more to this story. I'm not going to pass any judgement on what the "more to the story" is here, I don't have all the facts, but it seems obvious to me that there are more facts, and that people are working from different amounts of information here.
- dclusin 4y ago
  The two pieces of information I think that stand out are: 1. Law enforcement elected not to pursue charges 2. The banned parties were comfortable enough going to a respected newspaper with the facts of their case, which, the newspaper presumably also did due diligence and sided with the users. I don’t think that there’s really any “hidden” context here that would convince many (except maybe those who get their paychecks from big G) that google is not in the wrong. Perhaps the hidden context here is that they also investigated the couple after the journal report and found other “violations” which were ban worthy after, not before, their case was aired publicly. I don’t think many people would consider this theoretical scenario fair either.
  - lupire 4y ago
    10ish years ago there was a big kerfuffle about a semi famous author who got his account closed, and then it turned out that he was semi famous for...writing fictional child porn. Some people argue they fictional / textual child porn should be legal, but Google would never allow that in their servers. No idea about this case, but there are grey areas and the cowardly position is the legally/socially safest one, regardless of what one local police department decided. It doesn't make Google right, but it is what it is.

Multiple independent organizations inside a company each with their own rigid and inflexible operating procedures. The user to moderator ratio in the tens of thousands to 1. How is this hard to see?

kahrl 4y ago

"I'm biased, I work at Google"

danpalmer 4y ago

I don't know what you mean by the multiple organizations thing – this seems to be squarely in the realm of trust and safety. And while I understand the frustration in contacting a human sometimes, in this case it seems that a human will have reviewed the content and come to the conclusion based on their training, expert opinions, policies, etc (as per the article). What can human contact add here? Excuses or reasoning for the content? Given the media attention, someone will almost certainly have reached out if there was any way that a reason or excuse could possibly change the outcome. If they didn't that implies again that there's more to this story. I'm not going to pass any judgement on what the "more to the story" is here, I don't have all the facts, but it seems obvious to me that there are more facts, and that people are working from different amounts of information here.

dclusin 4y ago
The two pieces of information I think that stand out are: 1. Law enforcement elected not to pursue charges 2. The banned parties were comfortable enough going to a respected newspaper with the facts of their case, which, the newspaper presumably also did due diligence and sided with the users. I don’t think that there’s really any “hidden” context here that would convince many (except maybe those who get their paychecks from big G) that google is not in the wrong. Perhaps the hidden context here is that they also investigated the couple after the journal report and found other “violations” which were ban worthy after, not before, their case was aired publicly. I don’t think many people would consider this theoretical scenario fair either.
- lupire 4y ago
  10ish years ago there was a big kerfuffle about a semi famous author who got his account closed, and then it turned out that he was semi famous for...writing fictional child porn. Some people argue they fictional / textual child porn should be legal, but Google would never allow that in their servers. No idea about this case, but there are grey areas and the cowardly position is the legally/socially safest one, regardless of what one local police department decided. It doesn't make Google right, but it is what it is.