Content Monitoring
Something weird happened recently when we posted a review of Netflix anime TV series The Grimm Variations on the The Snarky Cats of Ulthar blog. As soon as we posted it, we received a notification that it had been flagged as adult content. It was instantaneous and the stats showed 0 views. However, the accompanying e-mail repeated the usual 'Your Post (...) was flagged to us for review'. How is it possible for anyone to flag a post without even clicking on it? Why would anyone want to do that and why would they pick this specific post? We checked the Content Policy and it hasn't changed. This is what it (still) says about how content is monitored:
We rely on blog readers to report content that they find inconsistent with Blogger's community guidelines.
And about what happens when a post/blog is reported:
When something is reported, it's not automatically removed. Reported content is reviewed by our team to verify that it violates those community guidelines. If the blog does not violate our guidelines, we will not take any action against the blog or blog owner. If we find that a blog does violate our community guidelines, we take one or more of the following actions based on the severity of the violation:
- Put the blog or post behind a sensitive content warning interstitial
- Unpublish the post, making it only available to the blog author
- Delete the offending content, post or blog
- Disable the author's access to their Blogger account
- Disable the author's access to their Google Account
- Report the user to law enforcement
It's not automatically removed?! That's exactly what happened to The Grimm Variations! There's no way a human could've reported it or reviewed it so quickly. It's just weird. The last time this happened was with Kinky Match and that was several spin-off blogs ago. In that case, the post had been up for a while, so we had no problem believing someone had reported it and the Blogger team had reviewed it and concluded it was too spicy. There's a process to get posts unflagged, but we decided to try something else first; we copy/pasted the original text and made a single change - we replaced the name of a sex act seen in Episode 5: Town Musicians of Bremen with a more generic 'we really didn't need to see the eldest Wade brother with those women'. We posted the edited review and... nothing happened (so far). We've been trying to understand what this means, and have only managed to come up with 2 possible explanations: there's a conspiracy to suppress negative reviews of The Grimm Variations, someone started monitoring our blog after reading our social media posts about the series, and as soon as the review popped up reported it and moved on, convinced their job was done; or Blogger has some AI filter that detected that specific word and automatically flagged the post.
This isn't the first time we've wondered if there were humans involved in Blogger's decisions. The same thought crossed our minds when our Comics page (reborn as Our Books) was unpublished. We find it hard to believe that anyone could've had a problem with it - it was just a page with descriptions of all our books + links to Kobo's online store. If all the posts about our digital comics had been affected, it might've made more sense - someone clearly hadn't liked our pitiful attempts at self-promotion - but just the one page was odd. Even funnier, was the fact that our Featured Post at the time, which was visible to anyone that landed on the homepage, was also about An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying, and included a link to the Comics page. We're not saying no one could possibly have reported it - what we found odd was that Blogger agreed and unpublished it. If you're just looking at the structure of the page, we get why it would look repetitive, but if you're actually seeing it, seeing the different book covers, and reading the text, it would look a lot different. So, did a human check it?
Honestly, we wouldn't have thought of this again if it hadn't been for what happened with The Grimm Variations, but now we can't help wondering about who, or what is monitoring our content and deciding whether it complies with Blogger guidelines.
