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

[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

[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.

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: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?

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: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.