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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.
Because it isn't an honest conversation, and never was. Holocaust Denial is literally a lie, and there are no compelling reasons to accept it.
Go read the transcripts of the Nuremberg Trials. It's all right there. The "six million figure" is an estimate based upon the number of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe before the Final Solution, and the decided lack of Jews after. Countries like Poland, which had large Jewish communities prior to the 1930s, had virtually no Jews afterwards.
It's simple math. The Nazis killed millions of Jews, Roma and other undesirables in a systematic and bureaucratic fashion. The only reason to deny the Holocaust is because you're a Jew-hater who wants to assert some new version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion-style conspiracy. In other words, you're an advocate for an evil and false ideology that is in fact responsible for the deaths of six million innocent peoples whose only crime was to be Jews in Europe.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The reason that it is a crime in Germany and Austria has to do with the historical de-Nazification of both countries after the War. It was part of the effort imposed by the Allies on these countries to make sure that Nazism never reared its ugly head again. It may seem silly in prosaic now (if you're willing to ignore the rise in anti-Semitism in Europe of late), but the anti-Nazi and anti-Holocaust Denial laws were deemed as necessary by the Soviets, British and Americans after they toppled the Third Reich.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You're wrong. 6 million Jews did die, along with millions of other 'undesirables' (as described by the Nazi government). There's plenty of evidence to back this up, enough to satisfy the court e.g. during the Nuremberg Trials.
Some of the luckier ones got out in time, or hid away during the war. But the sad fact is most of the Jewish population in occupied Europe was transported to concentration camps, never to be heard from again.
Saying otherwise is an insidious lie.
"Holocaust Denial is literally a lie, and there are no compelling reasons to accept it."
Bullshit. This is a philosophical problem of communicating information between sentient beings. I am under no obligation to accept your truth no matter how well reasoned and 'truthy' it appears to you. I have no DIRECT personal proof the Holocaust happened, I have only heard from others. There is an absolute, distinct non-zero possibility it was all made up. You cant FORCE people to accept your truth just because you you accept it.
I want to make it clear i am making a philosophical point, not arguing if the Holocaust happened. I accept the common narrative, but i wouldnt stake my life on it.
Good-bye
While I fully agree with your perspective, there is no reason to censor speech. There is plenty of information out there to show that the Holocaust was real. We also have facts showing that Mao killed an estimated 80 million Chinese people, Stalin and Lenin killed more than 30 million Russian people. China hates these facts being in public and given the chance they certainly would censor information. Russia hates their history put on display, and just like China would censor if they could.
Hell, don't you think that the US is embarrassed about some if it's own history being put on display? Don't you think that certain people in Government would like you to never know about Operation Mockingbird/COINTELPRO? How about the wars with the American Indians? How about the Democratic Party pushing Jim Crow Laws? How about Iran/Contra? In other words, censorship would be an issue for much more than just Holocaust deniers and in the US it's not just a Republican/Democratic party who would want to take advantage of censorship.
Free speech is all about having the fake and stupid ideas on display, so that people can learn to defend themselves against fake and stupid ideas. You don't learn and grow by living in an echo chamber, you learn and grow by having your beliefs and opinions challenged.
Trusting some arbiter of "truth" to censor gives the censoring body the ability to censor not just fake and stupid ideas, but anything that they dislike. Wholly hell, look at the media in the US today to see what a mess they can make by manipulating information. People are lied to openly, and even worse through more nefarious means by omission which is hard to detect. Those people are the ones who would be censoring if we allowed it.
People like Dennis Prager, Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, who happen to be some top notch conservative thinkers are not invited to Facebook or Google for any input. Why? Because their input harms the beliefs of the people who want to censor. That is why we can't allow it and need to push back against it.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Not that I know of. I suspect Google's been disappearing unpleasant facts on their News product for a while now.
"The holocaust never happened" is not an unpleasant fact - it's an out-and-out lie.
Which holocaust? The Jewish one or the Palestinian one or the Armenian one or the Native American one?
Which of these are we not allowed to say never happened? I know many Israelis would like to deny the Palestinian one and many 'Murcans would like to deny the Native American one. And of course the Turks would like to deny the Armenian one.
Are you going to pick and choose?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
This is not about censoring things "they do not like", it's about censoring flat out lies that are only made by genuine Nazis who thereby endorse the unbelievable suffering and subsequent killing of millions of people. If you can't see a qualitative difference between fighting active Holocaust denial and 'not liking fuzzy kitties', you really need to check your moral compass because it seems to be way off.
"Holocaust" and "genocide" are not synonyms. The Holocaust is a specific attempted genocide, namely that against the Jews by the Germans.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
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