Content marketing works best if it’s useful, inspirational, motivational, and documented. Of course there are times when we are brought back to the reality of Big Tech’s ultimate power over people’s content. What are some people’s first-hand experiences with content?
Tech Dirt experiences content moderation by Google:
Back in October, we wrote about how Google had declared -- with no details -- that an earlier post we had done was "dangerous or derogatory" and that it would no longer allow AdSense ads on that page. The real irony? The original post (which contains nothing dangerous or derogatory) was about the "impossible choices" platforms have to make when moderating speech on their platforms. So, what better example than "moderating" an article about how internet platforms will always be bad at content moderation.
But, in a way, this all highlights, again, the very mess we were describing in that original post: content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. You have to write rules that can be consistently applied by a large group of folks who have to review pages very quickly. So it's likely that somewhere in those rules is a prohibition on putting advertising next to certain "derogatory" words. That seems like a clearly drawn line... until there's a comment that isn't using those words in a derogatory manner, but rather to demonstrate questions about content moderation. But there's no exception written into the rules, and there's no allowance for taking the context into account (which would be impossible in its own right, because no reviewer is going to have the time to understand all the context).
