Welcome to the Google Star Chamber

Shame on Google and SCPP for lumping some pages from Dance Radio Post and Discogs (just to name two) with those file-sharing sites.  The links on our Megamix pages are kosher unless they have a problem with Amazon.com and Google’s own YouTube.  Organizations that represent rights holders need to use better software and a little human verification.  Good intention is no excuse for sloppy work and false accusation.  And gatekeepers like Google should know better.  This search engine had issues between 2003 and 2007; it’s happening all over again (since the mid-2010s).  If not for the efforts of Lumen (formerly Chilling Effects), we wouldn’t know the extent of Google’s star-chamber tactics.
#BadAutomation #NoDueDiligence #NoDueProcess #GoogleEpicFail

Here’s more evidence software automation with little to no human oversight is a recipe for disaster.  After an investigation by The Times in 2017, major companies on both sides of the Atlantic decided to boycott Google for placing their banners alongside YouTube videos they find objectionable.  Meanwhile, serious videos about sensitive subjects are deemed not advertiser-friendly by Google’s software.  And during the 2016 election cycle, publishers of fake news claimed to have profited from the Facebook and Google ads displayed on their sites.  Yes, programmatic advertising can be problematic.  (Check out this “60 Minutes” report on the power of Google in 2018.)

Blind trust in automation is really an industry-wide issue.  We wish The Times or some other news organization would start an investigation of Yelp.  Most of the so-called suspect reviews look perfectly fine.  Yelp’s rudimentary software generates so many false positives that most people who’ve ever posted reviews have some of them tagged.  But they wouldn’t know it unless they go back and check each business page where they posted a review days or weeks later.  That’s because Yelp’s software doesn’t do its thing immediately after a review is posted.  Yelp should do what Amazon.com and other sites do with customer reviews: leave them alone.

E-mail systems also produce false positives in the spam folder.  The whole industry should acknowledge there’s a problem and work on eliminating false positives.  Using software to discern fake stuff is tricky business.  One person’s propaganda is another’s truth.  If Facebook is not careful with the detection of fake news, it will end up with a lot of false positives (think satirical sites such as The Onion) just like Yelp.

We’re not saying these companies shouldn’t use software to do part of the work.  The Internet is vast; some automation is inevitable as a first pass.  But before blacklisting a page or a review, they should exercise some due diligence to verify the results.  And they must implement a one-step process for anyone to report false positives.

We are aware that when a company banishes a review or hides a search result, it may not be technically censorship because the government is not behind it.  But the effect is the same when they get it wrong.