• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, March 16, 2017

It turns out that Google has hired 10,000 contractors worldwide to judge search results. These raters get actual searches to conduct, drawn from real searches that Google sees. Guided by a 200-page manual, they then rate pages that appear in the top results on how good those seem as answers.

Part of the process includes spotting and reporting “Upsetting-Offensive” content —defined in part as promoting hate or violence against a group of people based on criteria including (but not limited to) race or ethnicity, religion, gender, nationality or citizenship, disability, age, sexual orientation, or veteran status; racial slurs or extremely offensive terminology; and graphic violence, including animal cruelty or child abuse.

If we have learned anything this past year, it is that hope trumps truth for a vast swath of our citizenry. What you and  I thought were somewhat universally understood truths are dismissed as "fake news" by those who are somehow inconvenienced by real facts, figures, history, science and other proof points.

To question established "truths" and institutions that produce them is a classic Russian tactic frighteningly outlined in “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia.” Disinformation worked there, why not here?

One wonders, therefore, how Google decided who gets to vote on content that turns up in its searches. And how many of them have to agree before Google takes action that is effectively a form of censorship by committee?  

About 95% of the comedy I see these days on TV and online in some way disparages race or ethnicity, religion, gender, nationality or citizenship, disability, age, sexual orientation, or veteran status. It's pretty routine on most sitcoms regardless of network. So, can a 5,001 majority vote make it unfindable on the Internet?

The Web has thrown the idea of community standards totally out the window. So it will be interesting to see just how the Google Group of 10,000 defines “Upsetting-Offensive.”

Cheating in such systems is not unheard of. There was a time when 1,200 families with diaries (later, People Meters) pretty much decided what was renewed on TV and what got dropped based on how much they watched this or that. Turns out some of them routinely lied and either wrote down that they watched a certain show — or later, with meters watching, tuned in to their favorite shows even if they were not staying to watch them, because they knew that they had an important vote in keeping series alive.

Likewise, why wouldn't you vote up or vote down content that impacted you disproportionately, regardless of if there were any "global standards" to which others were trying to hew? After all, you were hired for your personal perspective; show it through your votes!

In a world where a crucifix standing in a in a glass of piss wins art awards — but is also seen by the more devoted as blasphemy of the worst kind — one can expect the Google Group of 10,000 will have some nasty fights over what is appropriate and what is not.