Google Tells Army of 'Quality Raters' To Flag Holocaust Denial (theguardian.com)

Google is using a 10,000-strong army of independent contractors to flag "offensive or upsetting" content, in order to ensure that queries like "did the Holocaust happen" don't push users to misinformation, propaganda and hate speech. From a report on The Guardian: The review of search terms is being done by the company's "quality raters", a little-known corps of worldwide contractors that Google uses to assess the quality of its systems. The raters are given searches based on real queries to conduct, and are asked to score the results on whether they meet the needs of users. These contractors, introduced to the company's review process in 2013, work from a huge manual describing every potential problem they could find with a given search query: whether or not it meets the user's expectations, whether the result offered is low or high quality, and whether it's spam, porn or illegal. In a new update to the rating system, rolled out on Tuesday, Google introduced another flag raters could use: the "upsetting-offensive" mark.

Comments

Goody Goody Gumdrops Google

[rmdingler]

It's about time one of these tech giants gave back to internet community and taught us all how to think.

The line between hateful speech and offensive speech is so thin, it can correctly be identified as in the ear of the beholder.

Even in the freest societies, the right not to be offended is not granted to any of us... that's how we keep the freedom.

Here's an idea

[argStyopa]

We should have a whole branch of government that 'fact checks' things.

We could call it the Ministry of Truth.

Then we could all be safer and happier, knowing the Ministry of Truth is making sure the news says what it should, right?