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

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.

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.

>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.

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?