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

Re: Google as gatekeeper of truth

[Samantha Wright]

It has to do with an attempt to manipulate the Overton window; neofascists have historically attempted (and still attempt currently) to downplay the Holocaust and accuse Jews of fabricating or exaggerating it. By doing so, they aim to make Hitler's regime (and by association, themselves) appear less unreasonable, and to maintain opportunities for public discussion about the supposed untrustworthiness of Jews in general by accusing them of pretending to have been victimized. It's more strategically useful than taking responsibility for the Final Solution, which creates a comparatively foreboding and unapproachable image of SS officers in gas masks.

This is the same strategy employed by 'fake news' stories on Facebook: assert that your enemy is doing something bad, thereby making your followers more hostile to them, and, hopefully, tipping the balance of opinion for those who are undecided. Most propaganda works this way.

Re:Google as gatekeeper of truth

[MightyMartian]

Reality is not dependent upon semantics. Unless you're a nihilist or an omphalist, in which case, your philosophy truly is pointless.