More Censorship

Last night I saw a poster on a stack of unsold blue beer cartons offering $10,000 weekly giveaways, a rather obviously desperate marketing ploy. I posted a shot of it to comment on how bad things must be to justify such a move, but Google immediately deleted it as a violation of their community guidelines. They didn't explain exactly what the violation was; social commentary has generally been considered fair use, and there was certainly nothing illegal or provocative about the language. 

Weirdly, Google just won a SCOTUS suit maintaining their protections in cases of people using the platform for commentary. Apparently that didn't encourage them to stop the censorship; and they must have automated it, perhaps using their AI, because the takedown was nearly instantaneous. 

7 comments:

  1. And I just got another pair of emails from Blogger claiming that my blog post "Desperation" had been deleted for violating some carefully unspecified aspect of its "community guidelines."

    Sundar Pichai strikes again.

    Eric Hines

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  2. I appended a note and requested a review. We'll see if that goes anywhere.

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  3. raven2:09 PM

    It is enemy controlled media. With the new automated and AI assisted info,and censorship, it will be very hard to determine if any event is real, is fake, or happened at all, unless one is a witness. Covid is a prime example of this.

    If they could scare 1/2 the country into surrendering their rights, and calling for incarceration and forced injections at gunpoint if necessary, over a disease that had severe consequences for maybe 1/10 of one percent of the population, what else can they scare people to do?
    THERE WAS NO VISIBLE EVIDENCE OF THE COVID DANGER.
    From the hype, bodies should have been stacked on the street corners waiting for the daily pickup. Everyone should have known a dozen friends or acquaintances who died from it.
    Yet people were unwilling to trust their own eyes over what some "authority figure" told them. That scares me- how susceptible people are to mass hysteria with no observable evidence.

    If the same treatment was used on the much imagined "white supremacists", every conservative guy in the country with a pickup truck and a American flag would be in a camp or dead, and half the country happy to see it.**
    And coming full circle, nobody would be able to say a thing against it, excepting face to face- so look over your shoulder...

    ** until they need their toilet fixed, or the roof is leaking.



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  4. I posted another piece that was instantly taken down just a few minutes ago. Obviously anything with a picture is now triggering an automatic AI-based review, with presumptive bans on anything that gets flagged. I appealed that one too.

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  5. Anonymous10:14 AM

    Yet still more censorship!

    Facebook banned a post that said "Jesus died so you could live"
    because it violated community standards......

    Facebook’s demonstrated hatred for Christianity wasn’t an accident either.


    https://voxday.net/2023/05/23/redefinitions-and-rhetoric/


    I believe that The world needs to know that:

    Jesus is GOD.

    He is the truth the light and the way.

    There is no other way to heaven than through Jesus.

    https://voxday.net/2023/05/23/redefinitions-and-rhetoric/

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  6. In fairness, they did restore both posts after I appended an explanation of why they weren't in violation of the policies. At least, not the stated policies.

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  7. In fair fairness, you shouldn't have had to explain anything to them.

    1) They should have identified the community guideline they claimed your post offended and then laid out in concrete, measurable terms how your post offended it.

    2) It was no algorithm that did the (knee-jerk) censoring; the algorithm is only the tool by which the humans did the censoring with the software they wrote for the purpose or had their programmer subordinates write for the purpose. Software, after all, only does what it's been told to do.

    Eric Hines

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