Google Drive bans distribution of “misleading content”

If the American revolution had happened 100 years later it would have looked like the Boer war. That's the war where the British used barbed wire and the machine gun to invent the concentration camp.

This was explored before in an excellent blog post.

https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...

Welcome to Iran, UK of 17xx technology of 20xx regarding online monitoring and censorship

`Magna Carta originated as an unsuccessful attempt to achieve peace between royalist and rebel factions in 1215`

> suggest that misinformation is some new phenomenon

Misinformation in this shape and form is a new phenomenon. And it is not just the scale;

- the number of agents that push their version of misinformation is at least an order of magnitude higher than ever, depending on the particular topic. So-called culture wars have so many different sides.

- technology not only scales misinformation, but it also accelerates it. The objective function of "increased engagement" meshes very well. Hard to grok, full fidelity facts don't get shared or recommended as much as rage-baiting or bias-confirming material.

- technology can on-the-fly piece together material to conform to whatever bullshit you want to hear, I want to hear or the other guy wants to hear. As it is optimized to increase engagement, it can efficiently generate personalized micro-narratives, which is ultimately a reflection of our personal biases.

The problems is it gets harder and harder for these narratives to converge. More on that below.

> If anything, what we're seeing with the internet is a more true democracy with a wider range of opinions, less controlled by small groups of plutocrats

As mentioned, original thoughts don't have the same propagation speed or reach as junk-infotainment, and you're just as subject to the narrative-shaping powers of those "plutocrats" as ever. They just blend in better.

But the larger issue is that you can't equivocate mere plurality with a functioning democracy. Ultimately there is a single reality, and even though we are in divergent positions due to having different entry points and framings, we should be - however little - converging in our narratives and understanding of that reality as time progresses.

But the opposite seems to be happening, we are getting dumber at scale, stuff makes less sense, institutional mistrust is at all-time-high. I am not putting this all on tech, but it certainly pours fuel on the fire of meaning-making crisis.

I wouldn't take it for granted that we could survive this without it creating a larger crisis first.

What I’m seeing is a disintegration of the narrative, with a relatively small group of disinformation plutocrats bombarding minds at scale with conflicting positions.

A compassionate view of humanity would say that humans are basically accepting. This openness can then be abused by viral misinformation. We could take the view that humans should just be self protecting and if they got duped that’s on them. But IMO that’s a depressing view of the world, and tends toward something like mutually assured social destruction in the limit. We need to protect our shared narrative.

Also personally I find the view that “democracy prevailed before, it’ll continue to prevail somehow” deeply unsatisfying. Democracy is not built into nature. It has to be proactively maintained and refreshed.

> Democracy thrived before the printing press

No it didn't.

Do you have examples of democracies before the printing press besides Athens and arguably the late Roman Republic? Those happened nearly two millenniums before the press and didn't last that long. "Thriving"?

When and where did democracy thrive before the printing press?

Annoying that you are getting down voted for what seems to be a very reasonable comment.

I have very few friends “in tech” and this is the view that basically all of them hold, this is the view that most of my family hold. Across the 100-150 people that spans the full (European) political spectrum and many different backgrounds and life experiences from growing up extremely wealthy, finding wealth through hard work (and luck) and success and borderline surviving - do not “SV tech circles”.

Basically it’s a view point that is able to accept nuance and grey. People who work in absolutes dominate headlines so it’s all we hear, in reality the majourity of people live in the middle.

>However, since then it's been widely accepted

It's not widely accepted at all, except maybe in the small circle of Silicon Valley elites whose ideas align with yours politically.

> the greater good is to prevent/punish it.

It's clear that a handful of genocides were caused in large part by hate speech, such as the Rwandan genocide and the Holocaust.

What's not clear to me (although I'm open either way) is whether strict hate speech laws would've reduced the odds of these happening. Do we have reason to think that to be true?

The first order effect is to chill that kind of speech. But is there a second order effect of making these people into martyrs and fostering resentment towards the protected group that does more harm than good?

My understanding is that pre-Nazi Germany had hate speech laws, and it didn't seem to work there?

https://www.bjpa.org/content/upload/bjpa/4_an/4_Anti-Semitis...

>It directly leads to mobs, riots, and revolution based on lies, not based on actual injustices.

Would love to see an example. The vast majority of revolutions in human history were results of hunger.

> You're not being 'censored' .. It's not a violation of your free speech... You're free to petition

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

> It's a private company owned by private citizens who also have the same constitutional rights.

The scale at which Google operates today, anything short of defining some of its popular products as public utilities would be disingenuous.

> Access to Google Drive is not a 'right'

Except this is not a Google drive (the product) access issue. It is an access to information issue, if you look at it fundamentally.

By this argument China's censorship of online messaging platforms doesn't exist either, because Weixin and Weibo are operated by private companies, so what they're doing when they block messages with undesirable content isn't censorship.

I'm not even close to convinced by your response. Relying on the public-private divide as the sole basis for your retort is weak. You also assert that the person is pushing a personal narrative, but I suggest you're doing the same.

There's an argument that private corporations that are involved in dissemination of information (search engines and social media) should respect principles of freedom of speech as a democratic principle, regardless of constitutional mandate.

Suppose the government outsources welfare eligibility decision-making to a private company. Does this mean traditional notions of fairness we would expect from such an decision-maker do not apply, because they are a private company?

If something is bad when a government does it, surely it's also bad if a really large company does it.

Come to think of it, why would it be bad if a government censors speech?

> Like, if Google has a hidden agenda here that makes it any more fundamentally compromised as a judge of disinformation than anything else, then whether or not it will be a free CDN for arbitrary content isn't remotely our biggest problem.

Indeed, the bias in Google Search is actually a very serious problem.

> It's funny to see people freak out about this when entire foundation of Google is built on the proposition that it can make effective judgments about the relative value of various content out there on the web.

You're thinking of Google Search, their web search product. The thread is talking about Google Drive, their file-storage and - sharing product. If you don't get the difference between these two products and the expectations around them, I don't know what to tell you.

The idea that _anyone_ can reliably enough decree what's misinformation is ludicrous. I acknowledge that there are vast masses of incredibly stupid people that need to pretend that Truth is handed down on clay tablets by God in order to function. We're much better off with the scientific establishment wearing this mantle than, say, religious institutions. And its pointless to try to convince these people that science is an iterative, incremental process that's based in skepticism, not certainty.

But the minority of society that understands and participates in the process of truth-formation (including scientists!) produces a widely disproportionate amount of epistemic value, and society depends on this process for basic functioning.

It's amazing to me that this isn't clear to everyone after the pandemic, of all things. The amount of claims that were banned from social media as "misinformation" that became expert consensus a couple of months later is mind-boggling. Following smart and quantitative people on Twitter was wayyyy more likely to provide you a healthy and safe pandemic experience than following the incoherent and self-contradictory public health recommendations (let alone policy). More important than this "direct-to-consumer" ability to discuss the pandemic is that experts themselves form their opinions through this type of discussion. The notion that there's a "someone else" who has reliably figured out which dissent is out of bounds is laughable.

I'll note again that Google's current policy is limited to fairly simple things, but it's an important Schelling fence being torn down and worthy of commenting on (and pushing back against, if yiu believe the trend is harmful).

> unless you share the document publicly

Based on Google's wording[1], it seems you just need to share that document with one single person; if that person flags it, at that point Google is allowed to investigate even if the document is not public.

[1] "After we are notified of a potential policy violation, we may review the content and take action, including restricting access to the content, removing the content, and limiting or terminating a user’s access to Google products."

"What if I just like to collect and share old conspiracy theory stuff"

The key word there is "share". Lots of people use the "share with anyone that has the link" for limited sharing.

> This policy does not apply to private files.

Yet. Once people get used to it, it will be extended to private files. Likely they will even build it into Android and create an API to report citizens storing questionable documents.

People rarely go and read the actual article so the headline must be accurate on its own or you misinform the public. Reversing or strongly altering the statement made in the headline in the actual article doesn't mean it is no longer misinformation, the damage is already done as the masses read the headline and now thinks it actually happened that way. Yet this seems to be completely acceptable even in most reputable news-sources.

I think it's less about being factually wrong, and more about leading people to factually wrong conclusions with truthful statements.

Even just saying "X sells stock Y before event Z" imples that X knew about event Z and that it would affect the stock price of Y. People will read headlines like this and walk away assuming there was insider trading, but that may not be the case. Nothing in that example headline has to be false in order for it to spread falsehoods.

(I confess I replied in a knee-jerk reaction to your set-up, rather than your main point. Sorry for that. Your main point has meat on its bones and seems worthy of further discussion.)

What about American citizens who are separated from their children when arrested?

I am not aure about the US but here in Germany most experts didn't say it was a conspiracy theory, but that those who claim this is the truth lack the data to back it up.

I could also argue that there is a invisible unicorn orbiting the solar aystem. As long as there is no real proof for it we have to accept that it is just a theory. And the more facts align with my theory the more motivation there should be to check my theory by trying to disproove it.

SARS-1/MERS was prooven to stem from bats in the same region, so assuming that instead of a lab leak theory was more in line with known/knowable facts than a lab leak theory. When the facts changes theories change, that is science.

On the contrary, no expert believes the coronavirus lab leak hypothesis is correct; a few do however say it should be investigated.

This is exactly this kind of misunderstanding that this whole thread is about.

I call this thermodynamic truth.

And while it is the sole arbiter of truth, the moment something occurs that truth starts decaying via entropy. Photons fly away at light speed never to be seen by us again. The energy that remains starts mixing in ways that cannot be reversed. You quickly lead to scenarios where more than one initial state could lead to the current state we can measure.

And worse we can never exist in a system where we capture and keep this information. You either alter the 'experiment' by measuring it, aka chaos theory. Or, you bring about the premature heat death of the universe.

There are facts and there is the context of the facts and the impact those facts have on people.

One can argue the news should just report the facts, but they add additional context and information to explain why the facts matter.

Verifying the facts / truth is objective and clear (e.g. it rained 2 inches today). Determining whether the impact is properly reported (e.g. “devastating” flooding occurred) is murky. And the flooding could have been devastating - to one family, to a village, to a school. So it’s not untrue, it’s just more subjective as you move from numbers to impact. And the news cares more about reporting impact than facts and will tailor the narrative to explain the impact to their audience.

Look at the news service all sides. You can figure out the facts (e.g. a law was passed) then see what each side is saying about the impact. The impact may be true for both sides, just presented in a vastly different way.

I agree with this position.

The idea that there may be 'truths' sounds utterly bonkers to me. a ^ -a is considered a contradiction for a reason.

>I believe there is only one truth, and everything else is false.

That is maybe true with science, but not with living breathing things.

Just one example:

What is the best system to live in? Capitalism, Socialism or a mix of Capitalism AND Socialism?

Often it is just not a question of truth when it comes to humans.

Those engaging in widespread censorship create disinformation and falsehood, by omission.

In history, it has always been those engaging in widespread censorship who turn out to be disastrously and/or maliciously wrong.

The science now being censored has become so well-established, that at this point, Google/YT et al, has and will delete and suppress the sharing of peer-reviewed science published in mainstream journals and indexed in PubMed.

That 100% ends their credibility. I deplore anyone expecting an explanation as to why.

Anyone yet standing by such incredulous, irresponsible and/or actively-malicious action, reveals themselves as same, for all to see.

> The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like

Please, speak for yourself. I think these companies should host absolutely everything[0]. Between 2010-2016 was the golden age for these companies actually being free and open.

Edit: Within the law. To be honest, there is very little I see that should be censored beyond CP.

> we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like

I'd argue that there is already a (fairly) tried and tested process in place to deal with this, it's the legal system.

There are plenty of media outlets that publish stuff I don't particularly like, but almost none of it is illegal, so - to be blunt - I just have to suck it up.

Some of my friends have opinions that I - at times - violently disagree with, but I file that under one of the side effects of life, and I deal with it.

I'm rarely "outraged" by companies hosting stuff. If it's illegal, knock yourself out and get it taken down.

However if it's just really, really annoying or you find it against your own worldview, perhaps take a deep breath / drink a cup of tea* / go to the gym / hug your OH, and move on to something more important?

* or gin :)

> The other truth is we're all outraged when these companies host some stuff that we don't like ... and get upset when they don't host the stuff we do like.

Is this actually true? I only think certain fringe Twitter groups are mad that companies host controversial things.

I am absolutely happy if a company is ready to host everything legal.

Can't agree more.

Quite relevant quote:

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”

- John Dalberg-Acton

>> Turns out, not even Apple is that messiah

> They were, just no longer the same under Tim Cook.

Steve "we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone" Jobs liked making devices for everyone but definitely not for everything they might want to do on them.

I don't think izacus suggested it was. My read: there is no messiah, and a system of checks and balances is how we protect the public interest.

>What makes you think the government is that Messiah?

I didn't get that impression from that post...

In the EU, governments and actually trying very hard to discourage the spread of misinformation, as well as passing legislation that the tech sector has always claimed was not needed. So yes, it's very likely, as it's already happening.

Agreed. That's not even getting into just pure spam, which from people like Alex Stamos I've heard is 100-1000x the issue that culture war content moderation is. Once you've accepted that a platform can remove the kind of spam that killed MySpace- or doxing or a DDoS attack, as you say- you're already on the (common sense IMO) road to content moderation. Which again, from 25+ years of the modern Internet, we know is just mandatory to have a useable site

That's not censorship though. Threats are what people are forced to do when they cannot censor you, as censorship is much more direct. And DDoS attacks aren't speech.

> threatening to reveal their personal information, such as their legal identity

What's the problem with that? Bad things on the internet happen more often than not because of the lack of responsibility.

Doxxing has become the primary sin in the Internet religion but it would solve all kind of problems. I am going to commit that sin and say that Doxxing is the solution, you can downvote me and make my comment greyed out and censor me when you argue against censorship.

Instead of deleting content, simply make sure that it's linked to someone who can pay for it if it turn out to be something to be payed for.

The Anonymity argument is only good when you are actively persecuted by a state actor. I don't agree that you deserve anonymity because the public will demonise you. If you hold strong believes that can be met harshly by the general public, you better be ready for the pushback and think of ways to make it accepted. That's how it has been done since ever.

Therefore, when a content is questionable maybe the users should be simply KYC'ed en left alone until a legal take down order is issued. If its illegal(like illegal porn, copyrighted content, terroristic activities etc), go to prison for it. If its BS get your reputation tarnished.

>ISPs themselves, (older) reddit, 4chan all serve as examples that the people you don't want to talk to can be mostly siloed off to some corner and you can have your own corner where you can have fun. Things only get problematic once you add amplification mechanisms like twitter and facebook feeds or reddit's frontpage.

This isn't true at all, and the reddit report following their ban wave is pretty clear about it; once areas that actively established a standard of violent or racist discourse as acceptable were banned, the volume of objectionable material across the site dropped.

4ch had a similar situation, where the culture on /b/, which was intentionally left as an explicitly unmoderated segment of the site, a silo, actively invaded other boards with violent, racist content.

It isn't that people sit in silos and do nothing otherwise - it's that the silos themselves cause people to believe their content is acceptable, then spread that shit everywhere.

I think this is a really good point, and I think that if anyone is really committed to promoting free-speech-maximalist approach to the web they should be focused on building tools that make is easier for people to host and distribute their own content without relying on a centralized service.

Any business with the technical ability to censor what they host is going to be tempted (and likely pressured by other actors) to take down content that people find objectionable. Removing these "chokepoints" where a small number of people have the ability to engage in mass censorship is key if you want to promote more diverse speech on the web. (Not everyone has this goal!)

Is “seeing how the sausage is made” a requirement for having beliefs or opinions on the matter?

That's not how heresy works. People don't point fingers at you and hiss "heretic!", instead they judge you and think you're a terrible human being who does terrible things so they shouldn't help or associate with you. You can't "simply ban" heresy.

If you're genuinely interested in convincing people across the aisle to stop trying to ban stuff like this, simply yelling that it's "totally unacceptable as a consumer proposition" and "completely unworkable" and "doublespeak" is barely an argument. Evidently, many consumers are accepting it and will continue to accept it.

In a sense that may be true, but how is that different from a bar owner asking people to leave if they are causing a disturbance by being confrontational with other patrons? The bar owner doesn't want a fight that can damage property. He doesn't want people to avoid the bar because someone is picking fights, when most of his clientele just want to kick back and socialize with their friends.

Maybe the bar owner isn't trying to "protect" the rest of his customers, he's just trying to maintain a profitable business. Protecting his pockets.

You could apply the same logic to dang, who helps keep HN a pleasant place by doing the same things the bar owner is doing. Yes I imagine he is paid a salary, by the management of YCombinator who see HN as one part of their strategy to make a profit, and therefore his motives are equally cynical.

Ok. Honestly, you can probably reduce all human behavior to such simplistic motives if you want. What I see as someone being kind, you might see as a purely Darwinian strategy to get their genes in future generations.

I'm not all that sure that is a helpful perspective, at least not most of the time.

Given the amount of information Google has about its users I feel certain that they know exactly what percentage will be angered by this and what percentage will either applaud it or just not care.

Both interpretations seem like mighty big stretches to find this particular content as noncomplaiant with that policy. IMHO, if the policy gets stretched like that, then the issue isn't with the policy itself.

I mean, you could make similar stretches to hypothetically ban discussion of tax increases, because of the serious emotional harm that would cause to wealthy people fearing the loss of their money.

Honestly, the only issue with the actual text that I see is the reference to "emotional harm," given how subjective that is and how certain ideological propositions can be medicalized via that route. The rest of it is very reasonable, especially the paragraphs about civic processes and manipulated media.

Sorry but your content is misleading. Take for example the following quote, from Amnesty International, which cite in your article:

> governments [with] poor regulation of the possession and use of guns lead to violence and that they must tackle this now through strict controls on guns and effective interventions in communities suffering high levels of gun violence.

From this say the following:

> The key statement is:

Guns lead to violence

The statement above implies a couple of things:

1. Gun volume and violence are correlated

2. As the number of guns increase, violence increases

—————

This is a blatant distortion of what that quote from Amnesty is saying.

That are clearly saying that _poor regulation of the possession and use of guns_ leads to violence.

You are quite obviously engaging in bad faith arguments.

edit: formatting

>> It also includes incorrect claims that a political figure or government official has died, been involved in an accident, or is suffering from a sudden serious illness.

> In other words, it bans correct claims...that Joe Biden has dementia.

Do you have a source for that that isn't blatant uninformed speculation, hopes and wishes, or a doctored video [1]? Preferably one that is well known and has enough credibility to not be banned from Wikipedia.

Also, which of these is dementia?

1. death

2. an accident

3. a sudden, serious illness

[1] IIRC, during the election there was one pushed by the Trump campaign that was misleadingly edited and slowed down to create the false impression that Biden had dementia.

Joe Biden has dementia?

So, why is the government considered infallible precisely on those topics, if it is tacitly understood that it can actually make mistakes elsewhere?

Also, the formulation feels strangely US-centric, even though people use Google Drive all over the world and the formulation does not explicitly say which governments are considered as infallible in their census records. With no qualification, "government" can well be government of Iraq, Hongkong or Belarus.

I think Google (and the rest of FAANG) is wrestling with the uncomfortable possibilty that they are pawns in several nation-states' disinfo campaigns and they suspect their previous lack of intervention and professional having-no-opinion on questions of fact made everything worse.

It's possible that "Don't be evil" means "exercise control over the things you create." Frankenstein's monster wasn't created evil... It learned cruelty after its creator abdicated responsibility for it and it was exposed nakedly to a cruel world.

Serious here, not trying to be combative. How about sticking to what's legal under the First Amendment of the Constitution?