Beware, Google's New 'Upsetting & Offensive' Flag

It's always inevitable. Whenever a company's profit model depends on advertisers, sooner or later the corporate behemoths become the tail that wags the dog.

As you've probably heard by now, this past month Google added Section 14.6.1: Using the Upsetting & Offensive Flag to their previously 156 page Google User Content General Guidelines.

Yay! ...four more pages!

This means their army of over 10,000 quality raters have marching orders to emulate actual searches on a mission to evaluate top ranking web pages. Their goal? ...to decide whether or not these pages contain Upsetting or Offensive content—and to flag them if they do.

According to Google, Upsetting–Offensive content typically includes the following:

• Content that promotes hate or violence against a group of people based on criteria including (but not limited to) race or ethnicity, religion, gender, nationality or citizenship, disability, age, sexual orientation, or veteran status.
• Content with racial slurs or extremely offensive terminology.
• Graphic violence, including animal cruelty or child abuse.
• Explicit how­to information about harmful activities (e.g., how­tos on human trafficking or violent assault).
• Other types of content which users in your locale would find extremely upsetting or offensive.

Google's quality raters are using this table as a guideline.

Below are two more tables being used as guidelines. Raters are taught to flag a result considered offensively misrepresenting a scientific study in the first. The second flags a page promoting intolerance or hate.

Of course we can't help but notice the so-called acceptable