In the land of Google, Holocaust denial, death threats – all fine. LGBT? Oh, no, that's sensitive Google has asked its search quality raters not to assume that users looking up Holocaust denials, or whether women or Islam or black people are evil, are "racist or bad people." The ad giant pays approximately 10,000 people to use its search services using terms that real-world users have typed in and then report back on how …
Yeah, wifey was searching for something and entered
imdb the magician
Then she complained that the first 15 results were for The MagicianS
Google decided to "correct" a correctly spelled word to something they thought was more correct.
Yeah, wifey was searching for something and entered
imdb the magician
Why wouldn't she just GO TO the IMDB directly and then search for "the magician" there? I cannot stand it when people search for sites they already know about. I had a coworker who used to Google the literal string "youtube.com" and would then click the first result in order to go to YouTube instead of just typing the exact same thing into the URL bar. He could at least have used the "I'm feeling lucky" button!
(Sorry for my ranting here, but this is one of my pet peeves.)
There are actually people who look up Holocaust denialism as a cultural phenomenon, whether out of curiosity or whatever. There are also people who are explicitly interested in the culture of Stormfront and its ilk. It's hard to gauge someone's intent from a search query, and the same presumption of intent could be reversed. Suppose someone looked up "drug addiction recovery;" should Google presume that such a person is a drug addict? There are many reasons for asking a particular question, and a Web search gives very little context for it. Even if intent were known, tweaking search results to provide a particular result is inherently an ethical choice, which Google probably sees as a no-win situation: many people will be perfectly content with the suppression of Nazi propaganda, but many will also be upset with another entity making that choice for them, and then of course there are the actual bigots.
Fire icon, because bigots love burning things . . . and people.
@Throatwarbler Mangrove
You can also have people in other countries looking up these things because, while they understand the concept (it's right there is the term), the actually phenomenon is foreign to them. Like in Australia.
I'm sure I have looked it up because, after hearing about it as a slur against someone, in order to brand them as bigots or conspiracy theorists (or both), the question has come to me: is that really a thing? Like a common enough thing to get some much coverage?
Sadly, it seems that it is but I didn't understand the extent of the issue until I searched on it.
I agree. This is the most positive thing I've heard out of Google in a decade. "Treat your users with basic respect" - there's a concept I can get behind. "If they clearly want to see something in particular, it's not our place to hide it from them."
It's the same rationale whereby if you search for images of "london bridge", you'll get photos of several well known historical landmarks. But if you add a word like "sex" or "porn" or "milf" in there, you'll get photos of something else entirely. (You have been warned.)
"Treat your users with basic respect"
Gosh! What a crazy idea. Next thing some loon will come up with something completely wacko like, just for example, "don't be evil".
Hey, I believe it. Only yesterday I was sitting there swapping medication with my buddies Adolf and Napoleon ... well, he says he's Napoleon but I reckon he's really only Bernadotte, or possibly Mahtma Ghandi pretending ... anyway, we were sitting there making a new hat to keep the starlings out and trying out each-other's medications when Adolf stuck a dose of Napoleon's Penfluridol in his ear and said "Let's treat people like Dr Johnson with basic respect" . Seems perfectly reasonable to me. Wurble worble floop.
"... the German government has threatened a €50m fine if these companies fail to delete "obvious" illegal content within 24 hours."
There are things, such as display of Nazi symbols, that are illegal in Germany but not in other countries. I'm sure there are things that are 'obviously illegal' to a citizen of country-X. Will this lead to a balkanisation of YouTube?
But in practice, I think, the onus is on you to prove that you're using the symbol "legitimately". You can't just put swastikas on things on tell the Polizei to sod off until they have proof that you're using the symbol illegally. If I recall correctly, British Hindus have had to take action to block German attempts to ban their ten thousand year old religious symbol throughout the EU. (I guess Brexit will save them now.)
This post has been deleted by its author
"So it's OK to censor LGBT vids on YouTube, but it's not OK to automatically punish Holocaust denial sites. What a lovely place Google Land is. ®"
The LGBT vids aren't being censored. They are just being added to a list of sensitive things sensitive people may not want to see. By default these will be visible still. See Phil D : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoKqPjK75z4
Does Google believe it is the Internet? Nor I believe it's a public space/place - it's still a private run business with its TOS - which it applies whenever is convenient to Google itself.
Of course the real meaning is "we will keep on hosting and never censor any content that makes us earn money".
> The LGBT vids aren't being censored. They are just being added to a list of sensitive things sensitive people may not want to see. By default these will be visible still.
The point is that, while there is a "list" that restricts perfectly legitimate content which may play a positive social role both within the communities involved and in society at large, there does not appear to be an option to restrict content which is gratuitously offensive or specifically aims to denigrate a group of people or another and has neither social nor cultural nor (intentional) entertainment value.
Google appears to be playing by pure marketing rules: offending minorities is fine, whereas offending "mainstream" consumers is not. At least by some weird and outdated concept of "mainstream".
@AC... "Google appears to be playing by pure marketing rules"... Watch the video I linked and others from youtubers like Computing Forever and you'll see that Google is essentially censoring anything that doesn't fit in with their leftist (they did pay the Clinton campaign a whole wad of dosh) ideology.
google, like all american companies, enforces it's Judaea Christian fucked up morality wherever it can:
slaughter, violence, hate speech ? sure - have all you can eat (it's in the bible after all)
female breast or heaven forbit, a man's meat and 2 veg - hide it away !! think of the children.. perverts perverts !
Your bigotry is showing. I would venture many of the people who work at Google do not identify as Jewish or Christian, although there might be some among them. I would also venture many there are youngish secularists, many atheistic, and that most do not attend to any religion nor attend any religous services.
True, Brin's Jewish father decided to flee the oppression and persecution your kind of bigotry spawns, to find freedom in the West, and true Page has a Jewish grandmother; but both - not presuming their personal religious beliefs - are rather free spirited intellectual types who so far have a distaste for censorship. I'm sure you've been able to find all the material you've wanted to find using Google, whatever your "morality" is.
So I'd rather they not fiddle with my results. If I want to read up on the history and ramifications of the war in Europe, please just provide the links and let me worry about my motives, my particular race, my religious and poltical history, thank you very much, Google.
If they want to mark certain subjects "sensitive" and provide a (turn off-able) adult filter, fine, go to it. Otherwise though, I just want they provide the links, uncensored. I can manage my own conscience, thanks again.
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