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

[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: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.