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I can't get past the sloppy and inflammatory use of English here. This is not 'censorship'. It probably isn't banning, nor is it 'shadowbanning'. Google tunes

I can't get past the sloppy and inflammatory use of English here. This is not 'censorship'. It probably isn't banning, nor is it 'shadowbanning'. Google tunes its algorithms and lets the chips fall. Some win, some lose. While I understand how Google's dominance in search can have outsized effects on Internet commerce, the writer has near-zero credibility with me based on their writing. Honest people making honest statements don't need to exaggerate to make the point.

conartist6 1y ago
[flagged]
nialv7 1y ago
if using algorithm to promote some information and suppress some other isn't censorship to you, then honestly your definition of censorship is narrow to the point of being useless.
- wanderingbort 1y ago
  Not promoting something is different than suppressing it. Censorship is active suppression. If Google was using AI to prevent independent people from accessing independent websites that would be censorship. Censorship is something that is done not simply the lack of something being done.
  - ipaddr 1y ago
    They literally change the algo to exclude smaller sites. That's active suppression. Promoting would be putting them on top of the "neutral" search results like they do for ads.
    - jjaksic 1y ago
      By that definition is OpenAI also censoring small websites? What about Washington Post, is it censoring small websites? Because I sure can't see them in any of those places.
JimDabell 1y ago
It’s appallingly bad faith. Google have a page where they give advice on “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content”: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creat... Things like “Provide a great page experience”, “Focus on people-first content”, and “Avoid creating search engine-first content”. This article reframes it as an unfulfilled obligation and betrayal because ‘Google Promised to Reward Publishers Who Invest Resources Into Content Created “By People, For People”’
- maeil 1y ago
  Advice, which, as evidenced by this post, is at this point utter nonsense which may at some point in the past have been true.
ipaddr 1y ago
It's a literal shadow ban and Google writes the new algorithms, talks about it internally and decides what type of sites it wants to down rank and replace with AI Answers. The algorithm isn't some mystery formula it is literally what Google decides. There is no someone wins someone loses. Google wants to provide the answers and is taking market share from smaller publisher today and larger publishers tomorrow.
- lesuorac 1y ago
  It's not a shadow ban if people can read what you wrote. Just like if I stab you it's not a mugging. Words have meaning.
  - const_cast 1y ago
    It's a soft shadow ban if you don't show up in searches, and that goes for every platform.
    - lesuorac 1y ago
      They do show up in searches [1]. They're upset because they show up in a search _below_ the "AI Overview" which means people do not click through to their site. The search result still occurs; nobody wants to read it in addition to the AI Overview. Feel how you want about a company making revenue from not intended to be free labor but it's not a shadow ban. [1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=travel+lemming+visit+peru https://www.google.com/search?q=travel+lemming+visit+peru
eviks 1y ago
> Google tunes its algorithms and lets the chips fall This is even more sloppy and could be easily applied to any real censorship, where some (censored) lose and some (not censored) win If you're "tuning" your algorithm with the goal of blocking all small independent websites, then yeah, you're doing the shadow (if you don't tell the sites about it) banning. By ignoring the intent of the policy and replacing it with a truism you don't really have a terminology counter argument
- gorjusborg 1y ago
  Censorship is about filtering out messages that are somehow 'undesirable'. That is not what is happening here. What's happening here is that someone has built a business that relies heavily on search hits from Google, Google made changes that negatively impact the number of hits. I'm not trying to minimize what is clearly a significant problem for the author, I'm just saying that misusing words like 'censorship' can water it down to the point that it has no impact. I abhor censorship. This isn't it.
  - eviks 1y ago
    Censorship is also about filtering out the messengers. But I wasn't talking about that, even my example was about banning, not censorship. And it wasn't about you minimizing it either, just that the argument which you've repeated here doesn't hold - if you ignore why Google changes negatively impacted the number of hits you can make no counter re. censorship. By the way, if they made changes to filter out travel advice messages (from small travel sites) because they think such messages are undesirable since they hurt their ability to earn money from AI models, than the same negative impact would meet your definition of censorship, no?
bgwalter 1y ago
He says that when he was invited to Google to discuss the matter, they said: And Google gave us a clear and unequivocal apology. Google said our sites didn’t deserve our shadowbans, and that it wasn’t our fault. Whether Google itself used the term "shadowban" or not, they clearly acknowledged the drastic effect of their algorithms that favor "AI". So we know what he means.
- croemer 1y ago
  Would be good to see the receipts of the apology.
  - mark-r 1y ago
    Given the kind of scrutiny that Google faces from regulators all over the world, you can be 100% sure there is no physical record of the apology. They wouldn't allow it.
maeil 1y ago
And I'm tired of this sort of sloppy and inflammatory discrediting. It fits 'shadowbanning' to an absolute tee. Without any kind of notification, or any recourse, a switch is flicked to "off" in a single moment, putting a domain on the shitlist. This is now very well documented, including by this post, and incredibly obvious from the graph.
- sceptic123 1y ago
  Certainly not what I understand as shadowbanning. > the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user (from Wikipedia) I'm not saying what they are doing is good, just agreeing that it doesn't seem like shadowbanning, it just looks like downranking.
- gorjusborg 1y ago
  I doubt it is even a ban. It definitely isn't a shadowban. A ban is when you are preventing from participating in something. Google is a service that indexes the internet and provides references to relevant information. Website providers aren't the users here, web searchers are. I guess you could argue that the site was 'banned' from search results, but I doubt that the author would care enough to search 100 pages of search results to see if they were still there, they just care that they aren't a first page hit. A shadowban is when a participant has been banned, but has no idea it has happened. This came about on certain link aggregation/social media sites as a solution to people being banned and creating new accounts and resuming their behavior.
TiredOfLife 1y ago
>Honest people making honest statements don't need to exaggerate to make the point. First i want to congratulate you on waking up from your 10 year coma. That statement is no longe true. Nowadays you have to lie and exaggerate to make a point. That's just how things work

conartist6 1y ago

[flagged]

nialv7 1y ago

if using algorithm to promote some information and suppress some other isn't censorship to you, then honestly your definition of censorship is narrow to the point of being useless.

wanderingbort 1y ago
Not promoting something is different than suppressing it. Censorship is active suppression. If Google was using AI to prevent independent people from accessing independent websites that would be censorship. Censorship is something that is done not simply the lack of something being done.
- ipaddr 1y ago
  They literally change the algo to exclude smaller sites. That's active suppression. Promoting would be putting them on top of the "neutral" search results like they do for ads.
  - jjaksic 1y ago
    By that definition is OpenAI also censoring small websites? What about Washington Post, is it censoring small websites? Because I sure can't see them in any of those places.

JimDabell 1y ago

It’s appallingly bad faith. Google have a page where they give advice on “Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content”: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creat... Things like “Provide a great page experience”, “Focus on people-first content”, and “Avoid creating search engine-first content”. This article reframes it as an unfulfilled obligation and betrayal because ‘Google Promised to Reward Publishers Who Invest Resources Into Content Created “By People, For People”’

maeil 1y ago
Advice, which, as evidenced by this post, is at this point utter nonsense which may at some point in the past have been true.

ipaddr 1y ago

It's a literal shadow ban and Google writes the new algorithms, talks about it internally and decides what type of sites it wants to down rank and replace with AI Answers. The algorithm isn't some mystery formula it is literally what Google decides. There is no someone wins someone loses. Google wants to provide the answers and is taking market share from smaller publisher today and larger publishers tomorrow.

lesuorac 1y ago
It's not a shadow ban if people can read what you wrote. Just like if I stab you it's not a mugging. Words have meaning.
- const_cast 1y ago
  It's a soft shadow ban if you don't show up in searches, and that goes for every platform.
  - lesuorac 1y ago
    They do show up in searches [1]. They're upset because they show up in a search _below_ the "AI Overview" which means people do not click through to their site. The search result still occurs; nobody wants to read it in addition to the AI Overview. Feel how you want about a company making revenue from not intended to be free labor but it's not a shadow ban. [1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=travel+lemming+visit+peru https://www.google.com/search?q=travel+lemming+visit+peru

eviks 1y ago

> Google tunes its algorithms and lets the chips fall This is even more sloppy and could be easily applied to any real censorship, where some (censored) lose and some (not censored) win If you're "tuning" your algorithm with the goal of blocking all small independent websites, then yeah, you're doing the shadow (if you don't tell the sites about it) banning. By ignoring the intent of the policy and replacing it with a truism you don't really have a terminology counter argument

gorjusborg 1y ago
Censorship is about filtering out messages that are somehow 'undesirable'. That is not what is happening here. What's happening here is that someone has built a business that relies heavily on search hits from Google, Google made changes that negatively impact the number of hits. I'm not trying to minimize what is clearly a significant problem for the author, I'm just saying that misusing words like 'censorship' can water it down to the point that it has no impact. I abhor censorship. This isn't it.
- eviks 1y ago
  Censorship is also about filtering out the messengers. But I wasn't talking about that, even my example was about banning, not censorship. And it wasn't about you minimizing it either, just that the argument which you've repeated here doesn't hold - if you ignore why Google changes negatively impacted the number of hits you can make no counter re. censorship. By the way, if they made changes to filter out travel advice messages (from small travel sites) because they think such messages are undesirable since they hurt their ability to earn money from AI models, than the same negative impact would meet your definition of censorship, no?

bgwalter 1y ago

He says that when he was invited to Google to discuss the matter, they said: And Google gave us a clear and unequivocal apology. Google said our sites didn’t deserve our shadowbans, and that it wasn’t our fault. Whether Google itself used the term "shadowban" or not, they clearly acknowledged the drastic effect of their algorithms that favor "AI". So we know what he means.

croemer 1y ago
Would be good to see the receipts of the apology.
- mark-r 1y ago
  Given the kind of scrutiny that Google faces from regulators all over the world, you can be 100% sure there is no physical record of the apology. They wouldn't allow it.

maeil 1y ago

And I'm tired of this sort of sloppy and inflammatory discrediting. It fits 'shadowbanning' to an absolute tee. Without any kind of notification, or any recourse, a switch is flicked to "off" in a single moment, putting a domain on the shitlist. This is now very well documented, including by this post, and incredibly obvious from the graph.

sceptic123 1y ago
Certainly not what I understand as shadowbanning. > the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user (from Wikipedia) I'm not saying what they are doing is good, just agreeing that it doesn't seem like shadowbanning, it just looks like downranking.
gorjusborg 1y ago
I doubt it is even a ban. It definitely isn't a shadowban. A ban is when you are preventing from participating in something. Google is a service that indexes the internet and provides references to relevant information. Website providers aren't the users here, web searchers are. I guess you could argue that the site was 'banned' from search results, but I doubt that the author would care enough to search 100 pages of search results to see if they were still there, they just care that they aren't a first page hit. A shadowban is when a participant has been banned, but has no idea it has happened. This came about on certain link aggregation/social media sites as a solution to people being banned and creating new accounts and resuming their behavior.

TiredOfLife 1y ago

>Honest people making honest statements don't need to exaggerate to make the point. First i want to congratulate you on waking up from your 10 year coma. That statement is no longe true. Nowadays you have to lie and exaggerate to make a point. That's just how things work