Regarding the need to remove my Family Relationships thread

[Anonymous]

Jeff, I’m confounded by this:

J Steele wrote:I am upset about this, but I am going to have to remove this thread. Four out of five pages have been flagged by Google as containing "Dangerous or derogatory content". I haven't read every page, but on the pages I did read I couldn't find anything even close to matching that description. The way that Google works, there is very little recourse in cases such as this. I either comply or they cut off our ads. I will leave the thread for a day or two so that you can finish the discussion, but then I have to remove it.

As I noted in the thread, I do understand that you have to comply, and I respect your hard work in running this site. But do you have any idea what they’re seeing? In my OP, I linked to a Snopes.com article that debunked a racist email, but I didn’t copy any of the language. People who responded were, on the whole, more balanced than is often the case at DCUM.

[jsteele]

I am completely baffled by this. Here is all I get from Google:



All the links that end in "889033.page", which is three out of the four listed, go to your thread. All three simply say "Dangerous or derogatory content". I don't get any further information. One thing that makes Google's warnings unhelpful is that they don't say exactly what content. It could be anything on the page. Moreover, Google indicated that these are "Must fix" issues, which is their highest level. Most of the time, the "must fix" field is "no". Finally, these pages are listed as "Disabled ad serving" which means no ads should be served on those pages. You might notice that the fourth page flagged, which was not part of your thread, is only "restricted demand" which means some ads could still be displayed. In short, this is the highest warning level Google provides before stopping ads to the entire site. It is pretty astonishing to me that Google fixated on your thread in such an extreme manner. Because -- based on the content of the posts -- this makes no sense, the only explanation I have is that it was triggered by your subject line. All of this is being done by machines with no human involvement. My guess is that the computers parsed your subject line which had the words "old", "white", and "racist" in it and didn't like the connotation. Remember that subject lines are repeated for each post, which means it appears 16 times on each page (one for each post and once at the top of the thread). Presumably, a page with those words repeated over and over again triggered something.

I want to stress that I found nothing objectionable about anything in your thread. It is regrettable that Google doesn't have a mechanism to appeal or ask for reconsideration of their warnings beyond asking for a "review" which is conducted by the same machines that found the issue in the first place. It is very rare that Google's findings are so incomprehensible. 90% of the warnings I get are for "adult content" and even if I don't agree with them, there is normally some sort of basis in reality. This one simply makes no sense.

[Anonymous]

Thank you sincerely for your explanation. I will be more careful going forward with special thought given to thread titles. I apologize if this presented a problem for you, and again I appreciate your website. Take care.