Google Demands That We Censor Our Content
nakedcapitalism.com
nakedcapitalism.com
Sure, I can go to 15 individual websites, select the specific branch I want (if I got another map service to spit out names of bakeries) and hunt for their opening hours in 15 different styles of menus.
Google is just really good if it can sell you something. And sometimes, I need something to be sold to me.
StreetComplete is a nice tool to accomplish this while I'm taking a walk.
That's confirmation bias. I could do the same argument going the other way. That google profits of misinformation by promoting content that is demonstrably false and have caused harm in the real world. BTW, scientist can have opinions too, and such opinions can be wrong. What opinions were expressed? That closing borders doesn't work? Yes, once there are multiple spreading points restricting movement in international scale doesn't work and would be unpopular due the economic harms it brings. That mask doesn't work? Yes, they don't work because to be correctly used you literally have to have them 100% of the time when you are outside of your bubble, something that the public isn't very disciplined about.
And speaking of masks as well, recall how early on in the corona debacle, The Science said that they don't work... :)
Also, not being associated with certain content is the purview of each individual and organization. The EU is a standard of this, that tells companies, like Twitter, that they still have responsibility about their user content, so they must moderate their site.
By the way, questioning the usefulness of cloth masks after that period would get you shunned or banned on many networks well past the point where we had ample evidence to prove that they were ineffective, so even ignoring the initial screw-up, there is plenty of easily provable information that was systematically censored by Internet information brokers.
That's as far as I'll go since I am about to head to work, and I've spent enough time playing the game where I'm told to dig for articles by people who don't bother doing it themselves, so hopefully this is satisfactory. The deletion should be telling, there's a lot of retconning and memory-holing going on unsurprisingly.
> So, why weren't we told to wear masks in the beginning?
> "Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected."
I also have this one bookmarked: https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-...
Edit: that link 404s now (curiuous). Still on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20210802065432/https://slate.com...
My recollection is that very early on (like the first couple of weeks) Fauci said that masks didn't work. Then later on once there were plenty of masks available, he admitted that he had lied because the medical personnel and others needed the masks more and he didn't want people to go out and buy/hoard all the masks. Basically the "noble lie" theory[1].
So I don't think there was any science saying masks didnt work. It was just that the person who is supposed to be our trusted head guide and Mr. Science himself, is a consequentialist more than a scientist.
Now for all the people (like Google) who censored posts and labelled them misinformation, etc based on Fauci's noble lie, I would cut them a little bit of slack the first time. But once he admitted to the fib, that should have been the end of his credibility. If he was willing to lie before, why wouldn't he do it again? Especially when it worked out perfectly for him?
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210802065432/https://slate.com...
really hope you've never told a single lie in your entire life before.
And regardless, any mask of any kind helps. N95 is much better, but even a basic cloth mask will help reduce the amount of viral load you breath out or in. Especially if both the person breathing out and the one breathing in are wearing them.
Did you actually read the article? Google literally is telling them to remove content that they don't want. This article is confirming bias.
> If Google is paying you to run their ads, you're their piper, and you play the tunes they call.
You just described censorship in crystal clear terms.
Consider the alternative: Either morally or legally, Google and/or their advertisers have to run ads on sites that they disagree with, thereby supporting them both financially and reputationally. Where, in that scenario, is their free speech?
You're free to say anything you want. I'm free to not endorse it or support it. So are Google and their advertisers.
(You might make a case for actual censorship if Google refused to index such pages.)
During war, letters home from soldiers and even generals are read by a censor and censored, so that sensitive information cannot get to the enemy. That is legal, that is agreeable, that is still censorship.
In this case, Google even specifies what articles need to be removed for continued advertising, so it is crystal clear censorship.
The definition most of us use for censorship is "I prevent you from saying something." What Google is doing is "I decline to help you make money from saying something." That is not at all the same thing.
Is Google breaking any laws? Probably not. Are they practicing censorship? Yes, they are.
If you sup with the Devil, sup with a long spoon.
Of course that is censorship.
It is the same abstract principle as TikTok removing unhappy or ugly people, even the motivation can be consolidated to a common position.
Google isn't threatening to deindex them, they're threatening to pull ads on the site. This is likely not because Google-the-ad-company cares very much but rather because their advertisers are very sensitive about what kinds of content their brand is associated with.
Additionally, the content that is most likely triggering Google's let's-not-scare-off-advertisers alarms is most likely not in the content itself but rather in the 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 comments that would get flagged to death on HN, one of which mentions vaccines in a hostile way.
So this really isn't a case of Google censoring Naked Capitalism's content, it's a case of Google's advertisers not wanting to be associated with an unmoderated right-wing comment section. We can discuss whether that is broken (for example are the advertisers less skittish about unmoderated left-wing comments?), but it's not as clear cut as you make it sound.
[0] https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/06/blowback-for-the-twe...
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"
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.
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.
NC has superior tech journalism to most dedicated "tech journalism" outlets. Yves et al have been sounding the alarm on algorithmic rulemaking sans human intervention for some time.
Maybe today they are more brazen in this intermingling, but it has always been there.
Of course back then ads were sold in house. You didn't have the powerful middleman who could afford to say no to just you. (there were such middlemen, but they were not as powerful as most ads were in house)
You can argue that, but the perspective seem intentionally stunted.
pressure from people → pressure from advertisers → pressure from google → pressure on sites
Here's an example of the FB PORN:
https://m.facebook.com/profile.php/?id=61556223509538
https://m.facebook.com/profile.php/?id=61556194929290
https://m.facebook.com/profile.php/?id=61551211684729
I've tried reporting them, and constantly told this is OK with community standards.
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.
Running the data centres has massive costs in terms of the energy required.
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.
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.
And if you bothered to read the original post the indexer was misclassifying them and then threatening them based upon a misclassification. I'm not sure what kind of world you want to live in but I'm very confident you're going to get that world and not be happy with it.
The problem is that, to get traffic to your site (i.e. have your speech heard), it doesn't help if you use these other ways to find websites. You need others to use these ways. And 99% of them won't. I'm all for advocating widespread change of these habits, but that's a society-wide effort, not something a single website can do, much less one de-listed by Google.
Yes, it's not impossible, but let's be serious for a moment, Google does control an enormous amount of web traffic. Are we really comfortable with advertising dictating which content is easier to popularize? I know I'm not.
It would even strengthen their own standing in a lot of ways, so it seems to be overall bad strategy, even if you want to maximize profit.
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.
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.
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.
What really happens is that both Google and the advertisers want it to be this way. Many Google employees hate the idea that their search engine "surfaces harmful information," and they define "harmful" in a much more broad way than most people do.
So no, Google doesn't get to use this excuse about "we're just hamstrung by the advertisers!"
I know it is not google.
Since then I knew that some links will falls to obscurity because some form of moderation/censorship.
Also, linked from the comments there, an earlier example : Substack + Stripe :
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.
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.
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.
VIOLENT_EXTREMISM, HATEFUL_CONTENT, HARMFUL_HEALTH_CLAIMS, ANTI_VACCINATION
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.
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.
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.
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-twe...
Funny complaint coming from a site called "Naked Capitalism".