It started early last year when Blogspot (a subsidiary (?) of Google and the host for TYWKIWDBI) started notifying me that some of my posts were being censored - not by removal, but by being placed behind a "warning" re the content:
Needless to say, none of the flagged posts were truly NSFW. I was annoyed by this, but didn't take the time to fight the reclassification. The one post that I am sorry to see hidden is the one entitled "Banjo Goiter - NOT" because I put a lot of work into that post, both correcting the medical diagnosis and standing up for the dignity of the man. When I tried to find that post today, it didn't show up on a Google search, and it didn't appear using the search engine in the right sidebar of TYWKIWDBI; I had to find a cross-reference to it in a Banjo discussion forum. So it still exists - but it's godawful hard to find.
Since I'm ranting about annoyances today, I'll add that Blogspot has also been trying to remove "spam" comments from TYWKIWDBI. I already do that by hand, but someone at Blogspot decided to run an algorithm to remove old comments, and these are some of the many many comments they flagged for me:
Note that some of these comments were 10-15 years old when they deleted them, and they were removing my own comments from my blog in a desperately misguided attempt at paternalism.
I wonder if other Blogspot users (Miss Cellania? Nag on the Lake? Just a Car Guy? Jobsanger? Bulletholes? Skeetmotis?) have experienced the same thing. It seems to have subsided now, but I do check my spam comments filter regularly.
That is truly astonishing. Editorial overreach writ large.
ReplyDeleteI just tested it, and without being logged into an account, I am not allowed to view the banjo goiter post even after clicking through the warning.
ReplyDeleteSo, how accurate is their auto-moderation? 90%? 95%? 99%? I would bet money you'd have to move heaven and earth to find /any/ accuracy information.
ReplyDeleteOut of context, any of those posts and comments could be spammy, or porny. And the machines are nowhere near smart enough to judge the content accurately, and won't be for another decade at least.
Overreach arising from corporate prudery (especially American corporate prudery) is a legit problem. Ironically, I feel the overall quality of the blogger service would be greatly improved if they did allow porn. Something like this:
1. Allow porn
2. Require anyone posting porn to flag it as porn. Flag the entire blog as a source of adult content, and allow these blogs to auto-flag everything they post.
2a. Also allow sexual health blogs to flag their content as not-porn.
3. A blog that posts objectionable content without flagging it faces severe sanctions up to and including suspension/removal of the entire blog.
4. With that in place, you could dial back the sensitivity of the rude word filter on non-porn blogs, and concentrate moderation effort, including manual moderation by humans, far more effectively.
The reason that would become possible is that even porn-posters are mostly honest. They're tightly-regulated in various other ways already. The fraction of porn-posters willing to post unflagged material is lower and can be flagged as suspicious and caught. And the fraction of non-porn-posters posting material the auto-moderation incorrectly identifies as porn is even lower, to the point where it could be hand-moderated. You should count as a reputable blog, and you should be whitelisted, even if you post a dodgy blog title every now and then.
In your case, you'd be a non-porn blog, and when the bad word filter finds the above posts, a human could check them and okay them. Once whitelisted, they wouldn't have to check you so much. This would be feasible because provided you can filter out the posters of objectionable content (and for most of them, allowing them to self-identify is sufficient) then false positives are reasonably rare. The overreach is 'necessary' because /everything/ must be checked against a could-this-possibly-be-porn filter. If adult-content posters could simply flag their content, the filter could just believe them, and the remaining filtering work would become far less onerous.
Unfortunately this all hinges on actually mature (in the non-porn sense of the word) behaviour by a corporation, so I'll expect it to happen about the same time as my unicorns are delivered.
A follow-up thought;
ReplyDeleteThere is a strong adversarial relationship between the corporations and the users. But most corporations want to be seen to be 'good', and most users are trying to operate in good faith. But the interface between the two sides is made of some very stupid machines that have to treat every user as a bad actor. Hence the adversarial relationship. It should be possible for the system to reward honesty, benefitting good actors. That would allow the moderation to concentrate on bad actors.
A 'trust but verify' security model, basically.
If being truthful is more profitable than dishonesty, then some bad actors become good. If the system can identify its good actors, and whitelist them, then it can concentrate its attention better on the bad actors and the undetermined, while spot-checking the good actors will generally be sufficient.
I’m sorry to hear this. It’s a prime example of the shortcomings of algorithmic censorship by social platforms and I suppose it’s only a matter of time before their robot overlords discover I exist.
ReplyDeleteFWIW - here is Blogger's "content policy".
ReplyDeletehttps://www.blogger.com/content-policy?hl=en
It's rather broad (and well-meaning). I think the problem was automating it to the decision-making of an algorithm.
I play a mobile game that uses an auto replace in the team chat that, for example, changes Cassandra to C***ndra when it loads the comment. This would be only mildly funny, and not hilarious, if it weren't for the fact that Cassandra is one of the characters they have in their game that you use.
ReplyDeleteI'd start calling Cassandra "She-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named" and turn it into a meme to shame the company if I was in any way involved. Just an indea.
DeleteI've never seen that warning. I wonder if it's because my Google search is set for show me everything even the naughty stuff?
ReplyDeletexoxoxoBruce
I've had a lot of comments labeled as spam because they were only one word. That seems to be the only thing they have in common. I've had posts unpublished because they broke community guidelines, but I can't for the life of me figure out what was wrong with them. But I haven't had anything labeled as sensitive.
ReplyDeleteToday I can't post pictures. They want me to enable cookies (again), but hitting "accept" doesn't do anything.
ReplyDeleteHey, they got me too... I had about 50 posts, all "unpublished" https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2023/09/i-didnt-know-that-this-blog-was-on-auto.html , and put into some stasis mode where I had to appeal the robo-censoring, and they automatically were reverted to published mode. I discovered it in September. Very damn annoying, as there was NO notification to me by blogspot, or Google, that they'd flagged and unpublished
ReplyDeleteHow to stop this?
ReplyDeleteA copy of wordpress, a good webhost with selective plug ins and manage your own comments.
I'm not aware that any of mine have been flagged. I can tell you that a long time ago I did a post entitled it "Smurf Porn". It was getting so many hits I had to change the name. Lol
ReplyDeleteThere's another post I did in 2008 titled "What is a Muffalo?". It's kind of a dumb post, but it's in the top 10 of my most viewed. For some reason in 2013 it got 650 hits in one day. I can't say that anybody has visited it since.
It got at least one hit today.
DeleteWell thanks for stopping by!
ReplyDeleteIt took a while but I found a post with the picture that I had labeled Smurf Porn.
If you are so inclined.
http://srevestories.blogspot.com/2011/09/smurfboy.html
It happened to me a while ago, but I solved it quickly. The problem that I have now is that I can't post comments while I'm using Firefox, only through Chrome. Am I the only one?
ReplyDeleteOver the years numerous readers have emailed me to report difficulties posting comments; often (but not always) the problem resolves by switching browsers.
Delete