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

Google as gatekeeper of truth

[sinij]

I am concerned that Google is attempting to act as a gatekeeper and arbiter of truth. While holocaust denial is certainly appalling, what else are they going to censor? What if China decides that Tiananmen Square is offensive?

Re:Google as gatekeeper of truth

[jellomizer]

As I see it we are in a no win scenario.
On the Web, Lies, Misinformation, Conspiracy theories, and Passionate Hyperbole carry the same weight as solid truth. Often when something is true, it is often sited a small number of times, while the Anti-truth messages need to broadcasted over and over again so to be ingrained.

While I don't like the idea that there is a small number of people judging what is true and not for the public to see, however as a culture we had abused our free speech rights creating a situation where checks and balances need to be put in.

Re:Google as gatekeeper of truth

[MightyMartian]

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.

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

[hackertourist]

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.

Re:Google as gatekeeper of truth

[MightyMartian]

No, they did not emigrate. They were murdered. The only significant exoduses where of wealthier families who had the resources to get the fuck out of Dodge, but since, despite the longstanding ethnic slur against Jews that they were all money hoarders, most European Jews were not wealthy people.

There were millions of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe before the War, only fragmented groups after, there's no evidence they emigrated, since only a few every managed to make it to Israel, Britain or the Americas. So unless you're asserting there's a magic land filled with Jews that nobody knew about, your claims is patently absurd.

But I get it, as with most conspiracy theories, all that is required as retort, even if the retort is utterly moronic and completely untrue.

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.

Re:Google as gatekeeper of truth

[hackertourist]

About 1 million Jews died at Auschwitz. This according to the Nazis, who kept meticulous records of their crimes.
The old sign probably read '6 million Jews died in Nazi concentration camps'. There's no conspiracy behind changing the sign.

The Nazis built factories with the express purpose of killing people in large numbers. The Americans built internment camps. The difference is huge. Calling the Nazi concentration camps "not a great thing" is a monumental betrayal of the people who were exterminated there.

So piss off with your denial. You're not convincing anyone here.

Re:Google as gatekeeper of truth

[admin7087]

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.

Re:Google as gatekeeper of truth

[MightyMartian]

He's not being very philosophical at all. There's nothing particularly compelling about Omphalism. It is, in fact, a denial that any kind of knowledge can be reliable. As you point out, if direct observation is the requirement, then any ability to determine the truth of a historical claim won't get much further back then when you were 4-6 years old, and really, couldn't even count things that happened anywhere beyond your immediate vicinity at that time, since watching something on TV isn't necessarily direct observation either.

The real joke is that what our brains "see" isn't even in and of itself direct observation. What we perceive in the visual center in our brain is a highly altered representation of the photons that struck the retina. None of our direct senses are really direct, and all go through considerable processing before we actively and consciously perceive them. About the only things that come close to being directly "observed" are some automatic reactions, like the jerking back at a painful stimuli, where our nervous system has evolved so as to not wait for the brain to sort out what painful thing our skin has contacted, but rather the sensation hits the lower parts of the central nervous system, the spinal cord. But even there, I'd argue that the sensation of pain that the spinal cord is detecting still has at least some processing by pain receptors at the site of the signal and by the nerves themselves, since even nerve cells have some processing capability.

So ultimately, if we're going to call Omphalism in all its forms a philosophy, I'd lump it in the category of "things people believed a long time ago, but which only stupid people still think are sensible ways to measure the world now."

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.

Re:Goody Goody Gumdrops Google

[GLMDesigns]

One of those is clear cut. The other is conjecture on your part.

This defines the problem.

You shouldn't be afraid to say what you're thinking. Freedom of Thought, Speech and Press are THE fundamental principles of a free society.

No freedom of speech and you're living under a tyranny. Tyrannies need not be repressive for the majority of the population. (Many people in China are doing quite well. It's still tyranny.)

Why is Holocaust Denial Such a Huge Deal?

[Tempest_2084]

I've always been curious about this. It's a dumb thing to do, and makes the person look foolish, but beyond that why is this actually a crime in some places? I mean I can pretend that Obama was never president, but that doesn't make it so and it makes me look really stupid, but they would never make that a crime (Note to Self: Check back in 10 years and see if they did indeed make this a crime). Just ignore the morons and let them play in their little pretend world.

Re:Why is Holocaust Denial Such a Huge Deal?

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re:Why is Holocaust Denial Such a Huge Deal?

[Solandri]

It's picked up in the last couple decades as the people who survived the camps and the soldiers who liberated them have been dying of old age. I remember reading an article in the 1980s about a Holocaust survivor who was invited to speak about about her experience to a high school history class What she was saying was so inhumane, so unthinkable, that the students were having trouble believing her, even when she showed them her tattoo. The teacher, who happened to be a WWII vet, had to step in and say it absolutely was true - he'd been there when they liberated the camps and had seen it with his own eyes.

Now imagine if the teacher hadn't been an eyewitness and the woman's testimony had had to stand on its own. With fewer first-hand accounts, it drops to a he said/she said state. And the deniers are working their hardest to speak as loudly as possible. I imagine in 50+ years we're going to have similar problems with 9/11 denial (denying that the attacks ever happened, not conspiracy theories about who dunnit).

Re:Searching for racism

[Samantha Wright]

...Why would a naive searcher believe racism is a thing of the past? Where are you seeing sources that claim this? You don't need to personally witness an atrocity to accept that it's happening. The first hit for that query actually returns Racism in the United States, which has an appreciable "Present" section. Similarly, I'm pretty sure most people today take it at face value that the holocaust happened without personally having to see photographic evidence of it.

Re:Memory hole

[Baron_Yam]

> Look at a video "6 million lies" on youtube, there is some compelling evidence that what we all "know" to be true

Ahh, "I hate Jews and that's OK if I can pretend the Holocaust didn't actually happen at all (or at least to the degree historians say it did)".

What a strange position.

I guess that's what you get when you start with "I hate Jews and believe they shouldn't be considered human" and look for ways to justify your hatred instead of looking for truth.

> I may have to give up my comfortable google searches for something a little more open and honest.

Or you could just stop looking around entirely and get all your 'information' straight from Stormfront. Why risk seeing something that contradicts your prejudice?

Re:Does DuckDuckGo have something similar?

[vel-ex-tech]

Not that I know of. I suspect Google's been disappearing unpleasant facts on their News product for a while now. A number of times last year I went to find an article I knew I had seen on Google News with its own search and wound up empty handed. Using DuckDuckGo, I was easily able to find the article I was looking for.

If somebody can say DuckDuckGo (i.e. Yahoo as sibling pointed out) may be doing this as well, there are other alternatives. StartPage/IxQuick seems to come up often.

If all else fails, I guess we could always go back to the days of the meta-search-engine search engine.

Re:isn't that a German thing?

[Anonymous Coward]

I find it unusual when people claim that today's so-called "Native Americans" somehow aren't "immigrants", while pretty much everybody else supposedly is (even those who were born in America, and who had numerous ancestors born in America often going back centuries).

It's well known at this point that today's "Native Americans" are descended from Eurasians who crossed the Beringian land bridge during several waves of migration. For the time being, let's ignore that many of today's "Native Americans" also have significant, if not a majority, modern European ancestry due to interbreeding with European settlers.

So ignoring their partial/majority European ancestry, the reality is that today's "Native American" ancestors were just among the latest to arrive, likely displacing/eliminating those people who arrived earlier, such as the Clovis peoples.

In addition, there's also some evidence to suggest that people from Southeast Asia arrived in the Americas by boat even before then.

So it's absurd to consider today's "Native Americans" to not be immigrants. Their ancestors arrived in the Americas from Eurasia, just like the Europeans did. Their ancestors weren't even the first to arrive in the Americas. In fact, their ancestors could very well have exterminated the peoples who had arrived earlier. So it makes no sense to give them special treatment, ideologically or otherwise.

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?

Re: isn't that a German thing?

[Dishevel]

It is not like the Cherokee had ever killed or taken land from other tribes. All war and bad things are from the white man.

Do you think that you will ever be able to think critically, or do you have no desire to ever know things?

Agree, but still claim no censorship should exist

[s.petry]

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.

Re:Does DuckDuckGo have something similar?

[myowntrueself]

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?

Re:Agree, but still claim no censorship should exi

[MightyMartian]

That's an upward estimate of the Great Leap Forward. I think I've read that 20-40 million is a better count, but nobody really knows, since the whole famine itself was caused as much by local officials intentionally distorting virtually all the data on food shortages and deaths for the Chinese government. One thing is certain, however many died in the Great Leap Forward, it was enough people for the Party to sideline Mao for several years and for the more technocratic party members like Deng Xiaoping to run the country until Mao found his footing again and used the Cultural Revolution to sideline those in the Party that had diminished him due to the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward.

The Great Leap Forward is indeed a good example of how suppression of information can, if not create a catastrophe, then greatly inflame it, but in that case it worked somewhat in reverse. It wasn't the central government trying to stifle information, it was local and regional officials. But the reason those officials did it was because they had been handed absurd quotas (like the amount of steel to be produced by a certain district), and because they were sufficiently afraid that they wouldn't meet these quotas, they had a great deal of impetus to distort both the production numbers and quality of production (there are plenty of stories of large amounts of steel being produced that were of such low quality that it was effectively useless), and almost certainly to try to suppress any reports of famine and death tolls. But it's hard to imagine even if the figures had been honestly communicated to the the Chinese government that that information would ever have been disseminated, though possibly the plan might have been abandoned before the death toll reached as high as it did.

Re:Does DuckDuckGo have something similar?

[Pfhorrest]

"Holocaust" and "genocide" are not synonyms. The Holocaust is a specific attempted genocide, namely that against the Jews by the Germans.