Be that.
I just got a phishing email titled Your post titled "910 Group" has been put behind a warning for readers, and it claims to concern my post on grimbeorn (Grim's Hall) 'way back in December 2006.
I have no such post; I'm not sure I was reading this blog then. There is such a post, and it has no comment thread; although it is behind the "warning" block, and the warning block demands a login in order to view the post.
I don't think even Google (now Alphabet) reaches that far back to manufacture warnings. I'm running a deep scan with my malware package.
Eric Hines
11 comments:
That's weird. I wonder why they sent that to you and not me? I wrote that, a long time ago in a galaxy far away. I was not informed that Google was retroactively censoring my posts, though I noticed that almost the entire archive has been removed from Google search results. You can't find what you want through Google even if you know exactly what to ask.
Grim's Hall is 20 years old this year. Way back when there were no comments; then there was a comments system called Disqus, I think; or maybe there was an even earlier one, and then Disqus, and at some point they died and I lost years worth of comments and discussions.
That particular post, once I clicked through to read it, was probably barred because it discusses an anti-Islam organization. If they'd read it rather than running algorithms they'd have discovered that I was quite critical of their approach, and advised engagement and understanding of Muslims instead. It's the opposite of radical hate speech.
By the way, that's not a phishing email. When I logged into Blogger I saw a notice that 'this post' (without any indication which) was put behind a warning label. It's actually Google engaging in censorship.
That's why I suspect phishing slightly more than alternatives. It's hard to believe that even Sundar Pichai would reach back 16 years to start censoring.
I disagree, too, regarding the algorithm being at the center of this. The algorithm was written by humans, and it was a human or committee of humans that sicced the algorithm on your blog, among other targets. The algorithm is just a tool.
I probably got the email instead of you because I do post here occasionally, and I get a lot of phishing emails, even a couple of extortion attempts.
Eric Hines
"Destroy everything that looks like it might be remotely anti-Islamic. Let God sort 'em out."
Searching my own blog via google is a waste of time, even when, as with you, I know exact phrases to search for. I wondered if there was a benign explanation: "Most blog posts are unwanted clutter for ordinary searches, so unless there's been some reference to it, don't include old posts."
I wondered if there was a benign explanation: "Most blog posts are unwanted clutter for ordinary searches....
As I recall, when Google first started out, it did a lot of populating of its indexes by storing the search results from its users' searches. Blogging wasn't very widespread then, and what folks looked for was nearly everything but blog posts. I wonder if, today, those posts actually are showing up in search results, just nearly last on lots of pages of search results generated by finding "related" stuff that's higher up in Google's indexes.
Eric Hines
If so, they're not included in default searches. I have looked for an exact string match, and got nothing back at all, or special keywords and ditto. Maybe there's a flag in their search panel to allow looking through blogs--since they run blogger it would be trivial to index everything on the fly.
Now I'm told that "my" 910 Group post has been "re-evaluated" and "reinstated."
Whether that's because I clicked through the warning to see what the offending post was about or because Grim did, I have no idea. Maybe anyone clicking through would have gotten the post cleared. I stopped doing business as much as possible with anything associated with Alphabet some time ago, so my familiarity with its machinations is fading.
Eric Hines
I got the same message, with the re line "Your post title '910 Group' has been reinstated." It gives me a link where I can access the reinstated post, which of course I didn't click.
So I went to the post and added a update to the effect of what we have been discussing here, i.e., that if they actually read the thing they'd find it was the opposite of what they seemed to think. Apparently when I submitted the update it triggered a review, and they must have been satisfied.
I suppose that if that post was the only thing they found objectionable in 20 years of writing, I should be satisfied as well. Apparently this back-forever review by Google of Blogger content is real, though. I wonder if it'll be a one-time thing, or if it will recur occasionally -- and if so, whether drifting community standards among the tech elite will push more and more content out of bounds. What was OK in 2006 might already be a problem today; what is OK today might be a problem in ten years, &c.
I suppose that if that post was the only thing they found objectionable in 20 years of writing, I should be satisfied as well.
Alternatively, if you're not offending anybody, maybe you're not misbehaving enough.
Eric Hines
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