Google bans Podcast Addict app over non-approved Covid-19 content

At this point: I wish they’d just take a stronger stance and ban everything they don’t like. Just ban the political party they don’t like, ban anything that speaks out against China, just ban it all.

We need to go back to the web, where anybody could install Apache and off they went. Bandwidth is cheap now. BitTorrent exists.

I hope google and twitter and Facebook and all the rest just hurry up with all this.

Some other ridiculous examples of them becoming the ministry of truth:

There was a joke image going around on Facebook saying: “Arizona beaches packed during coronavirus!”. A joke about Arizona not having any beaches because it’s a desert. Facebook censors this and gives you some creepy warning before your allowed to see it.

Or how about: there is a doctor from the university of Minnesota who is running a large scale, international, placebo controlled RCT for a potential covid prophylactic. Twitter is censoring his links to find out more about the study. HE IS A DOCTOR RUNNING A STUDY AT A MAJOR UNI, and twitter is telling him he is misinformation.

It’s all just disgusting and is exactly what a lot of people feared would happen with these companies.

ban the political party they don't like?

Make their bias really obvious like we have for the major media companies so consumers can make an easy choice.

There is indeed a problem here, and FAANG are being hamhanded and overaggressive in their response, but it's hard to find an overt bias that maps neatly onto the dominant (American?) political cleavage.

Much more often (as here), these companies are 1) making decisions in a way that allows them to abstract away and thus ignore the nuances of individual cases 2) putting the burden of implementation on underpaid workers who are not equipped to make these decisions and 3) reacting to any noticeable pushback by moving 200% in the opposite directions.

Locating the problem in Political motivations overlooks the economic incentives that monopolies have to 1) lobby/appease the people in power 2) use political opportunity to squelch competition and 3) treat their workers as disposable commodities.

> At this point: I wish they’d just take a stronger stance and ban everything they don’t like.

Is there even any evidence that this app was banned because they "don't like" it? I mean, come on. This surely got flagged by an automatic system that thought it was a covid app. Google and Apple and social media and basically everywhere are absolutely flooded with apps and content designed to scam people by using fear of the pandemic. The need for a heavy hand to prevent this is real.

The world you want where people are free to talk about covid on every forum is a world where everyone's terrified grandparents are being scammed out of their savings. Scams like that were literally front page news on this very site not 15 hours ago!

Now... if they don't reinstate the app, then there's an argument. But I think the direction of the cuts made by Occam's Razor are really clear in this case: this is a false positive from a scam detector.

Yeah, if you relay content at scale, your first preference is to do nothing for moderation. After a little taste of that, people get upset and complain, which is just a little inconvenient at first.

It becomes progressively more inconvenient once some of those people with complaints can subpoena you or fine you millions of dollars or exclude you from large markets.

So your next best option is hamfisted moderation.

Tuning things costs money and time,[0] it's generally easier to just shoot the moon on either false negatives or false positives.

[0] and given conflicting preferences from different powerful groups, is arguably impossible anyway

Or, "I tend to go with philosophers from Voltaire to Mill to Popper who say the only solution is to let everybody have their say and then try to figure it out in the marketplace of ideas. But none of those luminaries had to deal with online comment sections."

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/22/rip-culture-war-thread...

EDIT: I should add, Podcast Addict is my go-to. I get how this can happen, but this is all really annoying and I feel for Xavier Guillemane and all the other users. Here's hoping the massive press blitz on this gets a quick reversal in this case, and Google finds a way to prevent it for apps with less visibility. Maybe we can enforce tuning by getting as upset as possible at the false positives.

It won't work that way, and they know it. It's a slow game, requiring patience on their end. They'll get to it eventually.

Perhaps a better strategy would be for Google to create an account for the head of government of each country, and give that account the ability to ban any app or video or search result in the respective country. (Such accounts would also have the ability to delegate their powers to other users as required).

Google could write a public blog post saying "We've sacked all our internal moderators and censors, so if you have any complaints about something being unfairly deleted, or not deleted, then vote for a better government next time."

We could then watch the rhetorical gymnastics of some governments saying that of course it would be a terrible infringement of human rights to have a government decide what people can watch and say online, without any sort of due process, not to mention the terrible mental health effects on government workers having to review all the potentially harmful content.

> HE IS A DOCTOR RUNNING A STUDY AT A MAJOR UNI, and twitter is telling him he is misinformation.

The best part is that they let actual fake news and misinformation run amok on their platforms.

You don't think they would want that power?

What kind of spam app detector is so bad that it doesn't claculate wirh maturity, popularity, and reviews?

The word used was scam, not spam

> We need to go back to the web, where anybody could install Apache and off they went. Bandwidth is cheap now. BitTorrent exists.

the ISPs are a concern. these can turn into an even more dangerous monopoly. can there be a new internet? home antennas? or maybe a way to somehow remove ISPs from the equation. a free flow.

>but it's hard to find an overt bias that maps neatly onto the dominant (American?) political cleavage.

What about things like google search suggestions being manipulated to hide unfavorable suggestions, but only for certain candidates? I remember seeing this happening real time after trying it one day per a reddit post and then a few days later per another reddit post that such suggestions had stopped showing.

The invention of the tools may have been orchestrated well outside of political leanings, but once invented and handed over for employees to use their application has follow political leanings.

Arizona has beaches.

https://www.azcentral.com/story/travel/arizona/road-trips/20...

Meshnet projects like Yggdrasil[1] and Hyperboria could be able to do this. I'm rooting for Yggdrasil at the moment.

[1]: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ and

> We need to go back to the web, where anybody could install Apache and off they went. Bandwidth is cheap now. BitTorrent exists.

From your mouth to God's ears friend. I can't tell you enough how maddening it is to observe the way technology has evolved since the time I first encountered the net in 1998. My vision of the future was and remains a server in every home, powerful enough to handle all your digital communication/entertainment needs. Everyone with their website and domain, email etc. What a world that would have been! Well so much for that. All we did was bring back the AOL model in a different skin. The AOL guys must be so mad now, they were just too ahead of their time!

what could go wrong with this approach

I don't find it hard to believe that Google does things like this, but can you be more specific? What experiment can I run myself to verify that this happens?