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Google Demands That We Censor Our Content
- _bkyr 3y agoReading the article I wonder how often YouTube would get sent these messages if it weren't part of the company: VIOLENT_EXTREMISM, HATEFUL_CONTENT, HARMFUL_HEALTH_CLAIMS, ANTI_VACCINATION
- Alifatisk 3y agoBut doesn't YouTube try to reinforce the rule by flagging such content and remove them?
- WalterSear 3y agoIf it's not overtly violent or sexual, my experience is that they actively promote it.
- sandspar 3y agoGoogle very much leans against conservative content. By this point, big tech's suppression of conservative viewpoints is so plainly obvious and widespread as to be Occam's Razor.
- WalterSear 3y agoFirstly, they don't, not even a tiny bit. All they care about is "numba go up" and "numba not go down". The fact that they've rustled your jimmies means they've mostly succeeded in their supporting objective - getting you to think they are actually engaged, and not just playing whatever side serves their ends at this current moment. Secondly, if you don't think they aren't promoting reactionary claptrap for clicks, I have to presume you don't use their services all that much.
- sandspar 3y ago[flagged]
- Applejinx 3y agoAnybody's guess whether they're doing it right now. YouTube has been the first really big experiment in libertarian algorithms serving functional purposes. They tried to get 'engagement'. Succeeded in the sense that there's no rival YouTube in practice, so yay them? Unfortunately the most efficient method of getting humans to provide this engagement is to turn 'em into monsters and cultists, something the algorithm did not account for. And here we are: the algorithm doesn't get to just prioritize engagement anymore. I honestly do not think Google were serving political ends there. I think they may have drawn the conclusion that seeking raw engagement inherently serves certain political ends, even ends that threaten their own company's existence and freedom, and therefore they are trying to bump up a level and define what is 'good' engagement, without abandoning engagement itself.
- lolinder 3y agoLarge numbers of YouTube videos get demonetized (which is what Google is threatening here), it's a chronic problem among educational YouTubers, especially in categories like history and literature.
- Zetobal 3y agoThe comments on the article are definitely something else.
- h2odragon 3y agoThe don't have to silence opinions; they could forgo the ads. and hosting services. and anyone else upset by their content. and build their own! There's some other folks on the other side of the political spectrum had similar problems not long ago. Perhaps their alternative networks provide an opportunity for you? They been through this already.
- christkv 3y agoNext step is automatic delisting from the google search indexes or massive de-boosting. Give it time.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoThere's other ways to find websites, like HN and word-of-mouth; I wish people made more of an effort to create and maintain alternative indices of websites. Too many people have gotten used to googling things instead of bookmarks and other ways to find a site.
- elmerfud 3y agoOh yes word of mouth is a great way to learn new information in the age of a society that bases its communication interconnected technology. It's totally reasonable to tell someone to start up their own indexing service to solve the problem as well. So your basic solution is people have to know something without knowing that they know something. How else can you bookmark something if you don't already know that it exists? I'm not sure how you cannot see the problem where a half a dozen companies have taken over your entire ability to find something in the modern world. Your glorious solution is go get the multi-million dollars of funding to build your own solution that does something different. There are other search engines besides Google but go ahead start using those other search engine and you'll find most of them are the same captured type portal information of content that they deem acceptable rather than allowing an end user to have some default filters but also be able to remove those default filters if they want. To be honest to God joke of your entire post is that Yandex is probably the best search engine at this point for finding actual uncensored information.
- ElongatedMusket 3y agoThis comment on the post sums up the issue quite clearly: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/03/google-demands-that-we-censor-our-content.html#comment-4006749 https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/03/google-demands-that-... His commenters are saying too many "bad words" that google ads doesn't like. It's been like this for over a decade, but from my perspective the "bad word list" has grown out of control to where people can't have anything more than kintergarden conversations on pages hosting Google ads. I kind of wish they would just ban every word in the dictionary so we can move on from their control of the web. If HN had google ads, the URL list in this spreadsheet would reach the moon.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoThis is the danger of hosting your own comment sections; by the powers that be (be it companies like Google or coporations) you are the end-responsible for user generated content. There's some leniency of course, since you didn't write it yourself. Personal anecdotes. Members posted porn gifs on my old fashioned forums 20 odd years ago, Google did not appreciate that. Members posted stills from an unreleased game on my current forums; we got DMCA takedown notices from at least three separate legal people associated with the company that published said game. If we didn't do the takedowns ourselves, they probably would've gone to the host and have our site shut down. TL;DR, if you use a 3rd party (host, service), your content has to comply to their terms and services.
- pixl97 3y agoAre we also not sure that this is a danger of letting one advertizer become dominant on the entire internet and controlling a large part of human discussion?
- marcosdumay 3y ago> I kind of wish they would just ban every word in the dictionary so we can move on from their control of the web. You know, when a company doing stupid things cause the entire world to self-censor, it means there's something very wrong with the intended democracy where it's hosted and the other ones letting their people being preyed upon.
- rchaud 3y ago....in order to comply with Google Ads, on which the site runs. NC has been around for years, I'm surprised they haven't moved to a patronage model of some sort. It's worth reading the actual criticism, but the clickbait headline implies that you are talking about Google impacting the site's organic search ranking.
- whycome 3y ago"Alphabet wants to ban words"
- delichon 3y agoI stopped letting Google filter my world when I saw that it had de-indexed conversations between extremely well credentialed scientists when they came to unpopular conclusions regarding Covid policy. This story appears to confirm that Google sees ideological influence as part of their core mission. I don't really object to that when the ideology is about transparency, neutrality, objectivity, so this isn't anti-ideology. But I do object when it's about censorship, advocacy and feelings, because my own ideology is pro-Enlightenment. So I've de-Googled, and I will be ready to de-Kagi, de-Zoho, de-LineageOS, etc. if they become similarly captured. I just hope that ends with me still having access to modern tech.
- godzillabrennus 3y agoI stopped using Google for search in 2017 and haven’t missed anything about it.
- hnuser123456 3y agoThat's around the time that the Google Now feed became blatantly opinionated. It would find articles about things that I'm interested that were also related to political hot topics, and if I clicked the button to tell it I wasn't interested in the hot topic, the only option was to tell it I wasn't interested in the topic I am. Even if there was plenty of content about the topic I am interested in that wasn't being tied into the zeitgeist.
- pbmonster 3y agoWhat do you use to find businesses, opening hours, ect.?
- hennell 3y agoA) Advertisers request content changes before showing advertising is not forcing you to not have that content, just saying you have to do that if you want their advertising. Why support Google's ad business? B) Here's a spreadsheet of complaints - if we look at this one last entry, it's not right therefore "Google's demand is capricious, arbitrary, and demonstrably false" is quite the hilarious leap. Based on it's own logic I think I now have more than enough bad faith argument examples to consider this site "capricious, malicious and demonstrably false"
- freedomben 3y agoI had the same initial reaction as you, but steel-manning I think it makes sense that they wrote it awkwardly. I still think they're being overly dismissive and reactionary, but given this affects their income they are probably a little justified in receiving this bot-driven algorithmic bad news poorly. I'm guessing they mean something like, "let's look at the case with everything in the book on it and see if it's valid. It's not valid, therefore this is capricious and arbitrary". For that to work, I'm also assuming that they aren't software engineers and don't understand how ML and Google work. They might even be thinking that there is a human reviewing their site and giving that determination. If you think that it was a human, I could definitely see where you'd find it capricious and arbitrary. But on that note actually I just touched one of my own nerves. Maybe we should be holding them to the "human" standard. I am abolutely sick of living in the algorithmic world where some algorithm makes a decision about me and I'm stuck with the fallout of that decision with no recourse. I think we need to start considering bot activity from a company as the same level of liability as a human.
- the_snooze 3y ago>But on that note actually I just touched one of my own nerves. Maybe we should be holding them to the "human" standard. I am abolutely sick of living in the algorithmic world where some algorithm makes a decision about me and I'm stuck with the fallout of that decision with no recourse. I think we need to start considering bot activity from a company as the same level of liability as a human. I sometimes take on a very uncharitable view of Big Tech and its focus on scale: they want all the power and profit of technological force-multipliers, without extending any responsibility and humanity for what it brings. I don't think it's unreasonable at all to expect well-resourced organizations like Google to invest in mitigating the externalities and edge cases their scale naturally imposes on the world. The alternative is basically letting a sociopathic toddler run wild with a flamethrower.
- ab_goat 3y agoGoogle is not demanding that they censor their comment. Google is telling them that they won't serve ads on their page because of issues. Funny complaint coming from a site called "Naked Capitalism".
- Freak_NL 3y agoIndeed; this is capitalism in its purest form. The linked article about 'Blowback' features user comments containing gems like ‘Grooming little kids to be “trans” or “queer” has outraged many and made things worse’. Advertisers generally do not want their ads seen alongside such polarized and extremist statements, because it could harm their brand (unless they are only targetting that demographic). They pay their advertisement platform to manage that.
- bryanrasmussen 3y agoit seems there is some incompatibility with the naked and capitalism here, and they selected for the first word not the second.
- pierat 3y agoWhat's weird is while this is happening, over in Facebook, my wall is now littered with softcore porn. Here's an example of the FB PORN: https://m.facebook.com/profile.php/?id=61556223509538 https://m.facebook.com/profile.php/?id=61556223509538 https://m.facebook.com/profile.php/?id=61556194929290 https://m.facebook.com/profile.php/?id=61556194929290 https://m.facebook.com/profile.php/?id=61551211684729 https://m.facebook.com/profile.php/?id=61551211684729 I've tried reporting them, and constantly told this is OK with community standards.
- braiamp 3y agoDifferent companies, different policies. Also, take it to the advertisers.
- shrubble 3y agoGoogle needs to die, in order for the Internet to live; their near-monopoly is stifling and they have repeatedly proven they are not good stewards of the outsized amount of power they have.
- threatofrain 3y agoI propose that the chain of causality goes: pressure from people → pressure from advertisers → pressure from google → pressure on sites
- BlueTemplar 3y agoHow long will it need to be pointed out that monopolies and platforms are evil ? Also, linked from the comments there, an earlier example : Substack + Stripe : https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/year-of-troubles-the-hatchets-come https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/year-of-troubles-the-hat... P.S.: it's a shame they fail to make the right conclusions : if anything, Musk's "everything app" is going to be even worse than we have now, for the same reasons.
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- Applejinx 3y agoGoogle has to take into account the fact that googlebombing in a coordinated way to wage information warfare, is a thing. No opinion on any specific action of Google, but I have very strong ideas about the efficacy of assuming anything about the internet is a libertarian unregulated market producing optimal results through natural law. Rather, the information ecosystem is a wildly polluted commons, polluted by design in all directions, and Google may simply be trying to keep track of the most intentional polluters and poisoners. Can't fault 'em for that. Also, 'profit' is a very flexible term. If you assume that the only profit is that of Google ads or ad revenue, you ignore the profit that can come from polluting the information sphere in such a way that you can execute a coup and conquer, subjugate and destroy an adjacent country, which is a very old school method of having an effect on the world. And yet, it persists, and uses the internet and Google (where possible) to facilitate the behavior.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lolinder 3y agoWithout stating an opinion, I just want to get some of the facts clarified since there are a lot of knee-jerk reactions here: 1) Google isn't threatening to deindex them, they're threatening to pull ads on the site. This is likely to be due to the fact that advertisers are very sensitive about what kinds of content their brand is associated with. 2) The content that is most likely triggering Google's let's-not-scare-off-advertisers alarms is most likely in the rather extensive comment sections. For example, one of the articles they call out as being flagged falsely [0] for vaccine misinformation and hateful speech doesn't mention vaccines in the body but does have a comment in the body that mentions vaccines in a hostile way. [0] https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/06/blowback-for-the-twenty-first-century-remembering-chalmers-johnson.html https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/06/blowback-for-the-twe...
- throwaway71271 3y agoThe internet is dead, by the end of the year most of it will be generated, including the comments here. Both Google and Microsoft are racing to put 'generate' button on every single input field, emails, forms, documents etc. Nobody can index and properly rank the amount of vomit that is spilling out right now. The cost per byte created is basically zero, but the cost per byte indexed is far from it. Let them force censorship, the transformer will generate whatever they want. Just paste the policy in gemini's 10m token model and ask it to rewrite it accordingly, no harm done. The real Eternal September has just begun.
- KineticLensman 3y ago> The cost per byte created is basically zero Running the data centres has massive costs in terms of the energy required.
- throwaway71271 3y agoor you just run llama on your pi4
- dave_walko 3y agoSo what is everyone using for search?
- socillusions 3y ago[dead]
- LopovJack 3y agoKagi.
- mukundmr 3y agoduckduckgo. It is getting better. I rarely need to fall back to a Google search. ChatGPT 4 is good at getting to the specific information that I am looking for and I can get the source links.
- renegat0x0 3y agoFor me a wake up scenario was when I was unable to sens link to my site to my brother through Messenger. I know it is not google. Since then I knew that some links will falls to obscurity because some form of moderation/censorship.
- rsync 3y agoDeeply disturbing for a number of reasons ... but also self-inflicted. I have been a reader of Naked Capitalism since 2008 and it is ironic that google flagged it with that collection of tags: NC is generally left-leaning and progressive and the host (Yves) generally espouses views that are the opposite of what you think when you see those tags ... ... but the healthy and stimulating discussion that ensues would, I suspect, confound a dumb classifier/parser. Again, ironic. I believe this is self inflicted because the site - and the publisher - are dependent on ad revenue. I have contributed financially to the site in the past but it seems not many others do and so they are at the mercy of the ad network and whatever constraints come along with that. I'm going to make another donation today but the problem will persist until she can find a way to divorce herself - and her site - from the ad network.
- dave333 3y agoGoogle at least tries to flag bad stuff, unlike X or Meta.