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By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

nytimes.com

31–40 of 168 posts

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#31

As far as I'm aware, knowingly destroying evidence of a crime is illegal. So would this be illegal also?

Do they actually delete the files? Or do they just remove public access to them, but keep them on their servers?

Maybe they send the data to law enforcement automatically? (I've heard that they do that for child pornography; maybe they do, or could do, the same for terrorist material as well.)

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#32

Not only Youtube, I've noticed a huge disparity between Duck Duck Go results and Google results when writing queries that could be thought of as containing a controversial/politically/racially/etc charged topic. Youtube recommendations and search/ranking suppress searches as it is, even if they were to leave the content on there, most of it will never be surfaced through organic means without a direct link or a searc…

The number of times I've taken a google search that gave me useless results, copied-and-pasted it into duck-duck-go, and immediately found what I'm looking for, is astounding.

I do think that they are starting to lose the power-user userbase when it comes to browsers and search engines. But their email, docs/sheets/whatever, drive, and now their DNS registrar services are all cemented into business flow.

It makes sense. They don't need the power users - they need the most users. As long as they have the most users, businesses (where the power-users are working) are going to use ancillary services like Google MyBusiness, Google Analytics, and embrace google-backed (and ranking-factor) tech like SSL certificates and progressive web apps.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#33
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. You need something like Internet Archive or better that is archival quality, random internet vandalism-proof and FBI raid-proof.

I noticed a month or two ago that certain sites seem to be excluded even from internet archives like the Wayback Machine. The first example I stumbled on was Snopes. I only noticed because I saw a Snopes link on Reddit where the thumbnail was clearly different from the live version; the thumbnail appeared to show a human-like baby in the womb, whereas the live version had that edited out. Example: https://web.archive…

I get "Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine."

To my understanding websites can chose to not be included in the Wayback Machine.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#34

Not only Youtube, I've noticed a huge disparity between Duck Duck Go results and Google results when writing queries that could be thought of as containing a controversial/politically/racially/etc charged topic. Youtube recommendations and search/ranking suppress searches as it is, even if they were to leave the content on there, most of it will never be surfaced through organic means without a direct link or a searc…

The number of times I've taken a google search that gave me useless results, copied-and-pasted it into duck-duck-go, and immediately found what I'm looking for, is astounding. I do think that they are starting to lose the power-user userbase when it comes to browsers and search engines. But their email, docs/sheets/whatever, drive, and now their DNS registrar services are all cemented into business flow. It makes sen…

> The number of times I've taken a google search that gave me useless results, copied-and-pasted it into duck-duck-go, and immediately found what I'm looking for, is astounding.

I'll bet it's dwarfed by the number of times I get useful results from Google and total garbage from DDG.

Earlier today I searched for "CADT syndrome" to figure out what another HN comment meant by it. Both engines automatically correct that to "cast syndrome" if you search without quotes. But only Google provided a relevant result after being corrected "no, I really meant CADT syndrome". DDG gamely provided the "cast syndrome" results after correcting the query.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#35

YouTube could solve this problem by throwing money at it, i.e. investing much more heavily in human moderators. They are extremely unlikely to ever do so, as the market would punish them for it in the short term and Google is unlikely to prioritize human rights over revenue. This presents an opportunity for another Internet Archive-like repo as mentioned in earlier comments. Unfortunately the barrier to entry (just g…

Isn't it well documented that the human moderators who do exist at places like facebook and youtube end up having their mental health screwed after they watch so much disturbing content?

Just throwing human moderators at the problem probably has more cost than just the salaries involved.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#36

As far as I'm aware, knowingly destroying evidence of a crime is illegal. So would this be illegal also?

Only if Google has a branch in Syria that is destroying the evidence for a legal action in Syria. Laws are linked to territories, US law is not applicable in Syria and the other way around.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#37
post #30

While NYT themselves just shadow-edited the article about HRC calling Tulsi a Russian asset to a Republican asset. Video from Tim Pool about it: https://youtu.be/tzTod38VS8c

https://i.imgur.com/VUdcIou.jpg

Straight out of 1984.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#38

Not only Youtube, I've noticed a huge disparity between Duck Duck Go results and Google results when writing queries that could be thought of as containing a controversial/politically/racially/etc charged topic. Youtube recommendations and search/ranking suppress searches as it is, even if they were to leave the content on there, most of it will never be surfaced through organic means without a direct link or a searc…

In fact, exact title searches will usually not turn up videos with that title unless you use quotes. YouTube will return clickbait and Jimmy Kimmel, entirely unrelated to the search, for exact title searches of videos with only a few tens of views.

Exact title matches don't match on IMDB or Amazon books, either. I don't think it's nefarious, it's just IMDB and Amazon think I don't know what I'm searching for.

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#39
post #19

Not only Youtube, I've noticed a huge disparity between Duck Duck Go results and Google results when writing queries that could be thought of as containing a controversial/politically/racially/etc charged topic. Youtube recommendations and search/ranking suppress searches as it is, even if they were to leave the content on there, most of it will never be surfaced through organic means without a direct link or a searc…

For anything not technical, I use DDG or Bing (If I need recency). Google results omit anything politically controversial.

Can you give some examples of politically controversial results google might be censoring?

Re: By removing “extremist content,” platforms are purging human rights evidence

#40

Not only Youtube, I've noticed a huge disparity between Duck Duck Go results and Google results when writing queries that could be thought of as containing a controversial/politically/racially/etc charged topic. Youtube recommendations and search/ranking suppress searches as it is, even if they were to leave the content on there, most of it will never be surfaced through organic means without a direct link or a searc…

The number of times I've taken a google search that gave me useless results, copied-and-pasted it into duck-duck-go, and immediately found what I'm looking for, is astounding. I do think that they are starting to lose the power-user userbase when it comes to browsers and search engines. But their email, docs/sheets/whatever, drive, and now their DNS registrar services are all cemented into business flow. It makes sen…

Yeah lately I've been shocked about the search result quality as well, way too often I am getting almost all seo spam results on google. I was actually reading their 10k earnings report a while back, Google specifically highlighted spam/seo results as a threat to their business. Most google users probably have never even heard of duck duck go before, I doubt they are in any kind of risk of losing market share.
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