Slashdot Mirror
Is Google's Comment Filtering Tool 'Vanishing' Legitimate Comments? (vortex.com)
Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein writes:
Google has announced (with considerable fanfare) public access to their new "Perspective" comment filtering system API, which uses Google's machine learning/AI system to determine which comments on a site shouldn't be displayed due to perceived high spam/toxicity scores. It's a fascinating effort. And if you run a website that supports comments, I urge you not to put this Google service into production, at least for now.
The bottom line is that I view Google's spam detection systems as currently too prone to false positives -- thereby enabling a form of algorithm-driven "censorship" (for lack of a better word in this specific context) -- especially by "lazy" sites that might accept Google's determinations of comment scoring as gospel... as someone who deals with significant numbers of comments filtered by Google every day -- I have nearly 400K followers on Google Plus -- I can tell you with considerable confidence that the problem isn't "spam" comments that are being missed, it's completely legitimate non-spam, non-toxic comments that are inappropriately marked as spam and hidden by Google.
Lauren is also collecting noteworthy experiences for a white paper about "the perceived overall state of Google (and its parent corporation Alphabet, Inc.)" to better understand how internet companies are now impacting our lives in unanticipated ways. He's inviting people to share their recent experiences with "specific Google services (including everything from Search to Gmail to YouTube and beyond), accounts, privacy, security, interactions, legal or copyright issues -- essentially anything positive, negative, or neutral that you are free to impart to me, that you believe might be of interest."
The bottom line is that I view Google's spam detection systems as currently too prone to false positives -- thereby enabling a form of algorithm-driven "censorship" (for lack of a better word in this specific context) -- especially by "lazy" sites that might accept Google's determinations of comment scoring as gospel... as someone who deals with significant numbers of comments filtered by Google every day -- I have nearly 400K followers on Google Plus -- I can tell you with considerable confidence that the problem isn't "spam" comments that are being missed, it's completely legitimate non-spam, non-toxic comments that are inappropriately marked as spam and hidden by Google.
Lauren is also collecting noteworthy experiences for a white paper about "the perceived overall state of Google (and its parent corporation Alphabet, Inc.)" to better understand how internet companies are now impacting our lives in unanticipated ways. He's inviting people to share their recent experiences with "specific Google services (including everything from Search to Gmail to YouTube and beyond), accounts, privacy, security, interactions, legal or copyright issues -- essentially anything positive, negative, or neutral that you are free to impart to me, that you believe might be of interest."
I'm getting sick of toxic comments. And I don't mean it that way, I mean all the focus on "toxicity" as applied to online discussions. I don't know if it started in the MOBA communities or if that was just the first place I'd heard it used, but now it seems like they've turned a marketable word for terrible communities into the easy label for anything you don't like on the internet. I get the symbolism they're going for, but when I see them using the term on people with opposing political leanings it always comes off more like poisoning the chocolate of comfortable purity with the peanut butter of uncomfortable differing opinions. Being a republican is not bullying, being pro-life is not threatening, using the word fuck in a sentence is not escalating (those of us with... let's call them enthusiastic vocabularies put up with that shit every goddamned time).
This is the same problem I have with Twitter, where you're able to straight up remove anyone from a topic, claim toxic behavior, and be vindicated. Only now we're training an AI to objectively determine what is a highly subjective behavior. I've had more of my level-headed mundane comments labeled toxic than I have my rants and trolls, nothing makes me confident that this solution will be better. I don't think it's worth stifling discussion and creating safe-space echo chambers just because teens seem to think that "Kill yourself faggot" and "get raped" is the height of satire.
The CBC in Canada does this as well. Once their left-wing golden child Trudeau took charge, the censorship in the forums got pretty bad. You can tell which articles are full of agenda that they don't want questioned at all, those being the ones where they've disabled comments altogether.
The worst part is that tax money funds their operation to the tune of $1B per year. We're paying to have agenda rammed down our throat.