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Comment by Klwohu | Hacker News Reader

They've been doing this for years, but think of it this way - we have no idea what thought crime this poor person committed. But surely, they did. I think the big message here is, don't get too comfortable. You never know when you've done something wrong until you get punished for it.

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This seems like it’s meant to be commentary on censorship, but I’d be willing to bet this has nothing to do with that. Google has closed or limited accounts for all kinds of reasons over the years that have nothing to do with what the user posted online.

More than "seems" and how would you ever find out?

He probably did nothing wrong at all but was collateral damage caused by their shitty "fraud" detection AI.

The crazy part is that all thousands of employees at Google and they don’t have a single one reviewing what the AI is doing? A review team doesn’t fix mistakes? Even if they do have a team, it’s been proven impossible to get in touch with them to fix anything.

The only team which can fix this issue is the team which trawls social media and occasionally decides to fix an issue, if it becomes enough of a PR problem. Hacker News, Twitter, and Slashdot are apparently the official way to reach humans in Google support.

Of course people review these things. Review teams look at this stuff all the time, and often fix it.

But at Google scale, bad things will happen.

Google serves over five-billion queries every day, and scale for gmail is similar. One-in-a-billion events are absolutely routine.

I don’t think anyone would disagree with your point about the scale at which Google operates or that these type of things happens

However, it’s clear they are not doing enough or not doing anything at all to remedy the problem of having a path to fix things when something does go wrong.

At Google’s scale, they should not be doing automation, AI or otherwise, without support in place when it goes wrong.

"Not doing anything at all" is factually incorrect, and what I was responding to for the gp.

If only there was some way to resolve issues, like having a customer support like with reps who could examine what happened. I hear Google is pretty strapped for cash, though. I have no clue how they'd pay for it, other than, perhaps, taking out a loan on the 11th ball pit or the backup three-story chocolate fountain at Google HQ.

Would this "fraud" detection be triggered by some unauthorized user trying their account password too many times or a more sophisticated attack?

In reality though, this is a single tweet without any context or follow-up. You have absolutely no clue what happened.

You don't even know if they clicked the "recover account" link before tweeting.

I thought it's usually a bounced card transaction tripping fraud detection...

> we have no idea what thought crime this poor person committed

They probably read a Dr. Seuss book /s

This joke is only funny if one is misinformed. Dr. Seuss's foundation voluntarily decided to stop publishing a portion of his works to preserve his legacy. That's it. There's no culture war to be found here.

>There's no culture war to be found here.

... Except eBay also disallowed sales of said books.

I'm not saying that the current owners of the rights to the books caused eBay to do so. That eBay "voluntarily" did this makes the situation worse, not better.

If you're a culture warrior, you have to force everything into being a cultural battleground.

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