So I invest time in writing a review about a particular establishment, upload a relevant picture with the food they serve, and how does Google reward my contribution? By sending me an email saying my review wasn’t posted due to a violation of guidelines.
Specifically, in the email they indicate the photo is problematic. It’s a photo of APETIZERS.
Is there any way to appeal this shameful error on their part? Otherwise, I don’t see a point in being a “local guide” anymore with such a broken moderating system.
@ivanos there are both human moderators and algorithmic moderators. Last time I saw a number there were 150 million Local Guides all contributing billions of photos and reviews, its not possible for humans to keep up with such traffic.
I know. And I am fully aware of Google’s policy to require innocent local guides to sacrifice their effort contributions hidden for Google to “fight bad reviews”.
oh by the way, before Google implemented this Machine censorship how many local guides are there?
That 150 million was announced at the last Connect Live in 2019 @ivanos
Its worth noting Maps has had algorithmic moderation for a very long time.
If you think you’ve got reviews that are incorrectly made private share links to several with a screen shot of the review and I can share them into Googlers for review.
Google has implemented moderation mechanism for a very long time but apparently the “plague” that we all talk about here hasn’t appeared until one or two years ago. So apparently the “moderation” now and then is different and what many of we local guides who are asked to sacrifice to fulfill Google’s purpose only care about the moderation now, not then.
I think that Google significantly changed the settings to the censor algorithm in the last two months. But they somehow forgot to monitor the consequences of that change. I’m pretty sure that there are thousands of other local guides that have been censored and a lot more that do not even realize that they got censored because of the nasty way Google chose.
Hope they can find some decent programmers to fix that issue and can let go the useless and careless ones.
Thank you for your review of Boucherie Maison Preset. Unfortunately, it isn’t posted because:
Google’s moderation systems and processes identified content that may violate our photos and videos criteria. The relevant content was in a photo submitted with your review. Any photos that were not found to be violating will still be posted publicly but not associated with your review. It’s possible that your contribution also violated other policies. You may edit and resubmit your review at any time.
It’s not an “occasional” occurrence; rather it happens quite consistently even among my family members, that their reviews get hidden from public view, even though they contain nothing inflammatory, hateful or abusive.
The moderating algorithm is broken, plain and simple.
In fact, I only recently became aware of this “shadow-banning” algorithm after booting up a new iPad without being signed in, and looking thru the reviews of a restaurant I had frequented. I noticed my own review wasn’t showing up at all, and neither was the one posted by my cousin.
I didn’t understand what was going on, until doing more research lead me to people on reddit also extensively complaining about the AI moderator.
A small step in the right direction, for my latest review they actually sent an email warning me about it being filtered out.
Please do not be abusive to the Maps developers @PetrusMaximus there is no need for that. Discussing issues is fine but calling Maps people names and calling for them to be sacked is not appropriate.
Thanks can you upload the exact photo you posted here too please @EliCH and go to the review in your profile hit the share button and paste the link here and I’ll submit it for you.
The issue is being looked at @ivanos if you can share links to specific reviews that are hidden for checking that would be great. It doesn’t matter that they’re not public. To get the link go to the review on your profile and use the share button and paste the link here.
