Early this afternoon, I received an email from Google/Blogger:
As you may know, our community guidelines describe the boundaries for what we allow – and don't allow – on Blogger. Your post titled 'Is NZ Labour finally backing marriage equality?' was flagged to us for review. This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content; the post is visible at http://amerinz.blogspot.com/2011/09/is-nz-labour-finally-backing-marriage.html. Your blog readers must acknowledge the warning before being able to read the post/blog.My reaction was something along the lines of, ”Oh, FFS!”, though with words, not mere letters. The post is from September of 2011 and is about my irritation that the NZ Labour Party was trying to imply it was backing marriage equality, even though I couldn’t find any official statement confirming that. Labour lost the 2011 election, but marriage equality arrived, anyway, two years later after former Labour MP Louisa Wall’s Member’s Bill was drawn. By that time, most MPs, regardless of party, supported it. In 2011, however, that wasn’t the case.
Why was your blog post put behind a warning for readers? Your content has been evaluated according to our adult content policy. Please follow the community guidelines link in this email to learn more.
We apply warning messages to posts that contain sensitive content. If you are interested in having the status reviewed, please update the content to adhere to Blogger's community guidelines. Once the content is updated, you may republish it… This will trigger a review of the post.
So, why would a quite mundane, run-of-the-mill post about New Zealand politics from a dozen years ago suddenly get slapped with a “sensitive content” warning (image up top)? I have two theories.
The first theory is that it was just a Google bot erroneously flagging content that was not in any way “sensitive”. This sort of thing happens all the time on Facebook, which doesn’t use real people to check anything, so it’s possible that Google does the same.
The second theory is a bit more complicated, but it begins with the possibility that a real human being actually did flag the post. The question is, why on earth would someone do that to a post from 12 years ago that was made moot by later events? The only reason I thought of that I mused about the possibility that I might not give my Party Vote to Labour in that year’s election. The motivation could’ve been a desire to protect Labour from any voter defecting to another party in the this year’s General Election. This is illogical: the post is from 12 years ago and is clearly no longer relevant. A conservative creating mischief would’ve been more likely to flag a post criticising NZ’s conservative parties. I couldn’t see any logical reason for a real human being to flag that post from 2011.
The bot theory seems more probable: But if it was a bot, what could’ve triggered its circuits?
The post had a paragraph with four links to other sites, three of which were dead. The only live one was to the website of the NZ Labour Party itself—was that evidence of the real human being theory? Unlikely.
Another paragraph had a link to an article on New Zealand’s LGBT+ magazine website, and while the link itself returned a 404 error (“page not found”), could the bot have assumed that the site’s articles were “adult content”? If so, why? The 404 error page had nothinng evven remotely risque on it, nor did the homepage—unless the fact it was LGBTQ+ somehow made it “adult content”.
Whatever the case, I removed all the links (most of them were dead, anyway). Finally, I added an update to the last paragraph, just in cans the actual human being theory was correct: “[Update: in the end, I gave both my votes to Labour that year].” I figured I covered all the bases, so I clicked on the link to ask the post be reviewed.
As I was working on this post, I got another email from Google/Blogger:
We have re-evaluated the post titled 'Is NZ Labour finally backing marriage equality?' against community guidelines. Upon review, the post has been reinstated…I still don’t know how or why, precisely, a now obsolete post from 2011 was flagged. Even so, in the end the result this time was exactly the same as it was in the last incident with Blogger, back in May 2021: I won (although, to nitpick, this time the post wasn’t “reinstated” because it had never been removed, unlike 2021. Instead, it was just placed behind a content warning challenge screen, and that’s what was removed.
This incident is annoying, just as the one two years ago was, but I think it’s actually mostly just stupid—and a sign of things to come. As companies like Google, Facebook, etc., rely more and more on technology—algorithms, “AI”, whatever—to do work that requires human-level intelligence, this kind of thing is likely to become quite common.
Oh well, at least I got a topic of a new post out of it.
Related:
In April 2013, I wrote about documenting the things I talk about, and mentioned how back in 2010 I’d had advice to leave dead links in posts, and since then, I’ve never bothered to remove any dead links, though I’ve sometimes updated dead ones to new working links. This is the first time that I ever suspected that a dead link MAY have caused a problem. Or, maybe it wasn’t that at all. It’s unlikely I’ll ever know for sure.
2 comments:
The only time I've replaced dead links is if I were to link to the page itself.
If Paul McCartney were turning 80 (he did last year) and I linked to a post I wrote about him turning 70 and that older link had defunct music links, I would update.
To your primary point, IDK. My Blogger blog, rarely updated since 2010, is still out there. Maybe I said something offensive in my first five years of blogging?
There are no doubt plenty of things I've said over the years that someone might be offended by (political stuff in particular), but I know I've never included "adult content", which is why I thought it might be a link.
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