This Won't Be Abused At All: Google Offers Tool To Flag And Downrank 'Offensive' Search Results
from the this-whole-thing-is-offensive dept
Google is constantly under pressure from all sides to change how it ranks just about everything. There's a massive SEO industry, a decent portion of which is dedicated into tricking Google into ranking some stuff higher than others (or downgrading content that someone doesn't like). And, then, of course, there are the "outside" interests. For years, the legacy recording and movie industries would misleadingly blame Google for piracy and demand that it downrank "pirate" links. Google caved in and did so, and the end result has been kind of a mess. Because it's based on DMCA notices in to Google, the company now gets flooded with an ever increasing number of DMCA notices -- many of which are completely bogus (and potentially just designed to mess with search rankings).
On top of that, in cases where it does downrank so-called "pirate" sites, since people are still looking for unauthorized content anyway, they end up going to more dangerous sites, where they're more likely to get malware. And, of course, as we predicted, despite caving in and giving the RIAA/MPAA a tool to shape search results, those industries still aren't satisfied. Because they'll never be satisifed. That's because they fail to understand that the problem isn't Google. Google is just a representation of what's on the internet -- and many people on the internet want access to content that is otherwise difficult to get. That's not Google's fault.
A couple of years ago, Google also announced that it would allow people to remove "revenge porn" results from search. And you can certainly understand why pretty much everyone would want this as an end result. But, still, once you make that tool available, there's reason to fear that it, too, will be abused. And even if a company as large as Google may be able to properly staff up to go through and review each request, this only puts pressure on everyone else -- including much smaller, less well-staffed, less well-resourced players to do something similar.
And now... for reasons that are unclear, Google has announced that it opened up a tool that will let people report "offensive" results and potentially downrank those results.
With the change, content with racial slurs could now get flagged under a new category called "upsetting-offensive." So could content that promotes hate or violence against a specific group of people based on gender, race or other criteria.
While flagging something doesn't directly affect the search results themselves, it's used to tweak the company's software so that better content ranks higher. This approach might, for instance, push down content that is inaccurate or has other questionable attributes, thereby giving prominence to trustworthy sources.
Again, at a first pass, this kind of thing absolutely sounds good. We should want better results, and the idea of letting Google's many millions of users help flag certain sites to be carefully reviewed for "upsetting or offensive" content makes sense. But... again, this definitely seems like the kind of thing that is open to widespread abuse. First off, what is "upsetting or offensive" anyway? That's a completely subjective standard, and one that we've seen people judge very, very differently. Second, what do you do if you really dislike a particular site? You open up a vote-brigade by a bunch of people to label it "upsetting or offensive." Trump haters can go after Breitbart and Trump supporters can go after the NY Times. Hopefully Google resists those kinds of vote brigading, but just the fact that this kind of tool is open to such abuse is concerning. And, again, when Google does something like this, it puts more pressure on other sites, with many fewer resources, to do something similar or get branded as somehow "supporting" offensive content.
Again, none of this is to say that Google must be promoting "offensive" content. It has the right to create its search results however it wants. But the more tools it opens up to the public to potentially downrank sites, the more the risk is that such tools get widely abused.
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Filed Under: downrank, offensive, search, search rankings, vote brigade
Companies: google
Reader Comments
The First Word
“"Speech on the Internet can be unfiltered, unpolished, and unconventional, even emotionally charged, sexually explicit, and vulgar- in a word, 'indecent,' in many communities. But we should expect such speech to occur in a medium in which citizens from all walks of life have a voice. We should also protect the autonomy that such a medium confers to ordinary people as well as media magnates."
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If it doesn't offend somebody, it couldn't possibly interest anybody.
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Downgrade Brand X
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A phantom threat
You open up a vote-brigade by a bunch of people to label it "upsetting or offensive."
'Vote-brigade'? Come on now, I mean it's not like there are large groups of people that would intentionally try to bury stuff because they're being paid to muddy the waters, call them 'troll factories' for lack of a better term. Or large numbers of people that are being told that anything that contradicts what those in charge say is wrong and who might try to bury such 'lies' as offensive.
No, I'm sure that much like the DMCA process this one will be used only for good and will never, ever be abused for personal gain and/or entertainment.
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Re: Re:
If not, a brief description - Techdirt is a community driven site, and they provide the ability to flag posts that are not acceptable to the community for whatever reason. If a certain threshold is passed, the comments are hidden (but, perfectly visible to anyone who wishes to see them). These results do not carry on to other threads, unless the same IP is repeatedly reported (and thus passed into a spam queue to be manually accepted).
Google's search engine, however, is not a community, it's a tool used to find other sites. According to the description above, reporting does not affect the current search result, but will be used to affect future searches - at which time, the user will likely never know that the prior voting has altered what they see nor what they're missing.
There's almost no similarity beyond the ability for users to mark their opinion.
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Re:
You can also explain how an article describing the measures that Google are implementing ways to manipulate searches means they're "full of it". Because without that, as far as I can see it you're just another reactionary idiot not understanding what they read before launching into a knee jerk tirade.
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You guys would do well to base your assertions on something that's not easily proven to be utter bullshit within 10 seconds.
Case in point - I tested your assertion here, that flagging comments hides them from search engines. There is a hidden comment on this thread:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170316/17532836935/facebook-sued-israel-blocking-all-link s-to-site-critical-facebook-suggesting-site-was-unsafe.shtml#c258
The opening sentence is as follows:
"Did you see the reply in court from the Inventor of Email"
When I tried searching that in Google, not only does it come up linking to that same comment, the comment in question is the ONLY result for that phrase in quotes. (Obviously, that will soon change after this comment is crawled by Google's bots).
https://www.google.com.gi/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=%2 2Did+you+see+the+reply+in+court+from+the+Inventor+of+Email%22&*
The timestamp on Google's cached link shows the time of 20 Mar 2017 07:38:52 GMT, and clearly shows that the post has been flagged, but it's still visible, despite your claim.
Translation - you're lying, and you had better start living in the real world if you expect people to take you seriously. Your lies will be tested here and found to be lacking.
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A tale of a divided country
The tool Google is implementing gets widely abused, results get screwed up, nobody gives a fuk to the country as long as the other team is in the mud and my team gets whatever it wants. And everybody loses.
I'm talking about my country but I suspect you could add many others in this story.
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I understand being offended by content on a specific web page, but how can the search results be offensive?
If someone is offended by the results of their search, can't they just search for something else next time?
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'If it exists someone will find it offensive' I'm guessing?
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Re: A tale of a divided country
The hysterical part of all this is that the two original parties would have defeated themselves.
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Google bubbles
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what is google?
sorry stopped using it years ago...
use my own....nothing like having gigabit internet , and BOY DO I KNOW MORE THEN YOU
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Re: what is google?
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Rule 43 is along the lines of "The more beautiful and pure a thing is, the more satisfying it is to corrupt it."
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Re: Re: A tale of a divided country
Multiple parties started and died in the beginning of that nation because no party was entrenched at the time. Now... things are different. People have been thoroughly taught to believe that you only have two choices and you will be called crazy (by both sides) to consider a 3rd.
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Re: what is google?
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But if they don't manipulate searches, then what is it that you think will happen when you type something into a google search bar? The entirety of a search engine is combing through giant masses of text on thousands of sites and doing all kinds of analysis to determine which sites they think you'll find most relevant. If they didn't do any manipulation, it would be no better than a regex. But if all you want is a regex, perhaps go find some search engine from the mid 1990's.
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Re: what is google?
dun dun DUUUUN!!
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Re: Re: Re: A tale of a divided country
Actually, the reason we continue to devolve back to two effective parties - no matter how many third parties get started, and even rise to temporary prominence, or possibly even supplant one of the existing two - is because, in a single-choice first-past-the-post voting system, that is the natural result of people voting in their own best interests.
If 60% of the population opposes A, but that 60% is divided into 35% who support B and 25% who support C, and everyone votes for what they support, then the 40% who support A will win the election - even though the majority of people oppose A. This is known as the "spoiler effect".
In a voting system where you can only pick one option from the list, and where whichever option gets the largest share of the vote wins, the "smart" thing for the people who support B and C to do is to join forces behind one of theose two options; that way, they can make sure the thing they oppose doesn't win, even if their first choice doesn't win either. The downside is that whichever of the two choices they don't unite behind seems to have no support, and disappears into obscurity, leaving behind only two options.
The only solution to this is to switch to a ranked-preferences voting system, preferably one which satisfies the Condorcet criteria, so that people can instead list the available options in order from most preferred to least preferred. In a system like that, you can indicate that you prefer C over B, while still also being able to indicate that you prefer B over A - and the spoiler effect disappears, leaving room for people who like third-party candidates to express their actual preferences at the polls without negative consequences.
I remember it being reported that Maine approved a ballot measure to switch to such a ranked-preference voting system, as part of the 2016 election. It will be worth watching closely to see what happens in the next elections in that state.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: A tale of a divided country
If 60% of the population opposes A, but that 60% is divided into 35% who support B and 25% who support C, and everyone votes for what they support, then the 40% who support A will win the election - even though the majority of people oppose A. This is known as the "spoiler effect".
Or as I like to call it 'Defensive voting', where you vote not according to who you do want in office, but who you don't.
"I don't like A or B, and if I had any real choice I wouldn't vote for either of them, but given a choice between the two I like B slightly less, so I guess I'm voting for A."
Ranked-preference would do a world of good in fixing that problem, but given it also stands to upset the status quo in allowing people to vote for who they actually want, rather than voting against who they don't want, I expect it would be fought by both parties as 'too disruptive' or 'too confusing to the general public.'
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the next news headlines
In other news president Trump has stated his latest executive order that authorized the centralized control of all executive branch computers (for security reasons) to have been a great success.
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Re: what is google?
You sir are so SMRT. I wish I could be like you, than I would know something or two huh? Like when to use then and than. Gee that would be useful as to not look like an idiot while berating others.
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Re: Re: what is google?
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iNTERNET IS:
And you can either go and search the directory and Look at certain sections, or RANDOMLY open the book and find something different.
THE PROBLEM, tends to be OUTSIDE EDITING..
Like a Dictionary and someone Takes a Whole section(letter D) and changes the Order, changes the Meanings, Takes out the word THE' from any description..
WHAT good is a Dictionary when everything is Mixed up??
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Yeah, you see, that's not actually true...
http://fusion.net/story/312755/google-autocomplete-hillary-clinton-bias/
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"Speech on the Internet can be unfiltered, unpolished, and unconventional, even emotionally charged, sexually explicit, and vulgar- in a word, 'indecent,' in many communities. But we should expect such speech to occur in a medium in which citizens from all walks of life have a voice. We should also protect the autonomy that such a medium confers to ordinary people as well as media magnates."
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Lol, this is the internet, everything is offensive to someone.
Maybe it is - maybe it isn't - but as George Orwell said
“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.”
On that basis when someone objects to content Google should up-rank it!
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Re: Re:
His examples are correct, but may only be correct for him personally. He fails to point out that Google provides different experiences based on location, if you are logged in, and so on. Those differences are often significant, and to forget to mention this little issue.
Since we all know (and it has been proven again and again) that Google can and does manipulate these auto complete results to comply with legal orders and such, it's not unreasonable to assume that they may have also done it for the election. The absence of hard smoking gun proof (say emails within the company, or similar) does not say that they did not put their finger on the scale to tilt it a bit, perhaps in some places.
Taking Matt Cutts word at face value in regards to Google seems to be naive.
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SEO seems far more likely given Hillary's heavy focus on messaging sans substance. Not to mention the extreme and needless risk Google would place themselves under for making changes themselves.
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They already have a porn filter
I think they need to make 2 new filters.
1) Nanny State Filter - this would incorporate the existing porn filter and this new 'offensive' results filter.
2) Big Brother filter - this would do 2 things:
a) filter out anything the local national government doesn't want you to see, pirate sites, electoral opposition, topics they don't want covered, i.e. a per-nation-tuned version of the Great Firewall.
b) send every search query, and any resultant links clicked on, to the government, with identifying information, so the government can keep an eye on you.
3) this isn't really a filter, it's an easy way to disable all the other filters, it's called the Freedom Button. Pressing this will disable all the filters.
Then as a user you can choose, Freedom, Nanny Stage or Big Brother (or Nanny + Brother).
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If only every misdeed in the world could be erased by telling Google to forget about it...
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Um. Yes. For many years now, Google has customized search results based on who's doing the searching. That's not new. It's also not secret. Not sure what you're suggesting with your comment.
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Your Google search will return the page but visiting the page from a non mobile device will make it impossible to actually find the comment. Searching for it on the page appears to retuen nothing.
Like it or not the comment is effectively censored. Only someone knowing to open each and evety censored comment manually might find it. It requires an extended effort to find the comment which is just this side of oitrightly deleting it.
Its like holding comments for moderation for an extended period of time. While the comment is eventually published it is generally not part of the discussion and was likely not see by most readers. It's not wuite censorship but rather just inside the line with a big smirk added.
Pretending that the techdirt vote to censor is any different from a Google vote to censor is pretty loopy.
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I have only one thing to say about Google...
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You can view page source and search there if you wish, I believe, but then why would you be searching for the comment rather than reading the thread?
"Your Google search will return the page but visiting the page from a non mobile device will make it impossible to actually find the comment"
Bullshit. I'm using a desktop browser and I found the comment above with no problem.
"Only someone knowing to open each and evety censored comment manually might find it"
Funny, I read the shit you people spew over the site all the time without any problem. Are you that incapable of using the site, or have you just gone to so many lengths to try and avoid being held accountable for your own works that it's tripping you up when you try to backtrack?
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The negative links go up and down the list, it seems, according to how interested people are in finding out who I really am and what I am really about. While Google can have some affect on it by downranking, etc., it's the users who ultimately determine the position of the search results by clicking on the links that interest them.
What I'm saying is, users can in fact make changes to the results if they act en masse. There just needs to be a bigger mass searching on Google than there is on TD when we click the report button on comments we don't like.
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Re: They already have a porn filter
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Re: I have only one thing to say about Google...
Now off you trot and carry out a search, on Google, for "search engines." Count how many there are and make a note of it. Now I have three questions:
1. Did you find any other search engine than "Google"?
2. How do the other search engines perform compared to Google?
3. Is there any attempt made by Google to impede your ability to use these search engines, e.g. if you're using Chrome as a browser, does it flag up a warning telling you not to use these other search engines?
Okay, after answering those questions (I'm not holding my breath), can you honestly declare that Google is a) the only search engine your browser allows you to use, even if your browser is Google, and b) that Google actively stops you from using other search engines whether you're using their browser/OS or not?
If the answer to the final question is "No" on both counts, shut up and give it a rest. Feeding you ads based on your search patterns may be creepy but it's not the only search engine you can use so it's not a monopoly.
This link shows you market share: https://www.netmarketshare.com/search-engine-market-share.aspx?qprid=4&qpcustomd=0
That Google is the most popular engine is due to people being lazy, thinking of Google as "the internet," the fact that Chrome uses Google as its default search engine (you can change this in Settings), and the fact that it generally tends to return the results you're actually looking for. Once more with feeling, it's not a monopoly.
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Re: Re: I have only one thing to say about Google...
That's part of its momentum, sure, but it's worth remembering that a lot of the reason for their popularity was that when they came along, they truly were the best at returning what people wanted. Those of us who remember AltaVista, Lycos, etc. remember how much of a breath of fresh air Google was at that time.
That may no longer be true in all cases, but so long as it still works for people the majority of the time, people still choose it. That includes people who use other browsers, which default to different search engines (Microsoft's to Bing, Firefox to Yahoo), so if it was just people being lazy you'd maybe expect a higher marketshare for those 2 in the search space.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: A tale of a divided country
The term "defensive voting" more properly refers to the reaction to the spoiler effect: the people who prefer C deciding to vote instead for B, in order to prevent A from being elected, with the side effect that the real degree of support for C is not visible in the election results.
You're quite right that it's a major part of the problem, however, and that ranked-preference voting would seem to do away with the motivation for it.
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Re: Re: I have only one thing to say about Google...
The defining characteristic of a monopoly is that it is the only place where you can buy the thing it's selling - whether because that thing is not sold anywhere else, or because you can't get to any of the other places where that thing is sold.
You can get effective Web-search results from places other than Google (even if they may not be as good as the ones you get from Google), and as long as the network remains even vaguely neutral, you can get to those other places just as easily as you can get to Google. Thus, Google does not have a monopoly in the search market.
There's more of an argument that Google may come close to a monopoly in the online-advertising market, but I don't think they pass that line even there.
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This again?
Popularity does not equal monopoly, unless there are no other options available, so I'm curious as to what makes Google a monopoly in your mind.
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If a comment is censored on Techdirt, searching for it in your browser (control F) FAILS - unless you have already unblocked the comment. Otherwise, it does not exist. Search will not find what is not visible.
This is tested with current versions of Chrome, IE, and that weird IE replacement.
"Funny, I read the shit you people spew over the site all the time without any problem. Are you that incapable of using the site, or have you just gone to so many lengths to try and avoid being held accountable for your own works that it's tripping you up when you try to backtrack?"
Wow, the big wave of dismissal. I have tested it with every browser I have, the ones that the majority of users would be using, and guess what? You cannot search a page for hidden comment text.
"You can view page source and search there if you wish, I believe, but then why would you be searching for the comment rather than reading the thread?"
Did you even type that? Listen up Kellyanne, few normal people would search source for a text string. They search on the visible page. Moreover, if you have to go to extreme measures to be able to find something, perhaps at that point you will realize the comment is censored. Why would you have to look at page source at all, unless it's not visible and not searchable to begin with?
Alternate facts aren't helping you out here. Use the site like a normal human (it might take you an effort) and you will quickly realize that the comments are censored, unsearchable, and generally unavailable without significant effort. That is all the makings of censorship.
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No, they're not even *on* fire, I have demonstrable facts on my side. You know, reality? That thing you keep avoiding so you can launch your pathetic troll campaign here?
"If a comment is censored on Techdirt, searching for it in your browser (control F) FAILS"
Again, WHY are you searching for a comment? Most people just read the thread. Are you so obsessed that you have to search for your own words to get off on them now?
Here's a hint: search for "This comment has been flagged by the community". It will usually be your comment.
"few normal people would search source for a text string"
What do you know of normal people? Anyway, I stated the way you can get around it if you really want. Not my fault your ignorance causes you to try and mock me instead of understanding how browsers work.
I also notice you completely ignored the fact that I exposed your lie about search engines for what it was. Funny, that.
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Oh, and I repeat: why would a normal human being be *searching* for the exact words you type? Most people read the thread, recognise your bullshit for what it is and move on to the next comment. I realise I probably shouldn't reply to you myself, but I do enjoy poking mental cases online to see what they come up with next.
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Glad everyone agrees.
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What colour is the sky in your version of reality, anyway? Here in the reality everyone else inhabits, it's a nice blue.
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Granted, a normal human being wouldn't be searching for the exact words they type - unless the one searching for those exact words is the narcissistic, prissy egomaniac who typed them in the first place.
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Re:
Who said John Steele was not to blame
When he was asked why
He let out a cry
"John wiped off my face when he came!"
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