Google Maps’ reviewing system has provided a platform for Nazi sympathizers and antisemitic harassment for years. It’s a quiet example of the trillion-dollar tech giant’s disinterest in moderation—and a loud warning about how easy it is for the far right to appropriate online services. Most items in Google Maps are treated like businesses which can be owned and managed, reflecting a system fundamentally designed to monetized. While this makes sense for restaurateurs and shopkeepers, it makes less sense for other locations, such as genocide memorials. You don’t have to go far on Google to find evidence of obvious moderation-at-scale issues. Reviews of Holocaust-related apps in the Google Play store, for example, are a miserable library of denialist rhetoric and misinformed debate. For Google Maps, though, the problem goes beyond user-provided comments and reviews. It’s structurally bound to how their mapping system treats memorials. As memorials are structured like businesses and the registration process for a “business” involves a physical mailing, it makes it nearly impossible for memorials to be managed and moderated by responsible parties. Even with the most recent update to Maps, the “attractions” highlighted underscore a five-star rating rubric that’s inappropriate for these venues. The crematorium at Buchenwald concentration camp is open to “business management”, just one example of an entity that cannot be verified according to Google’s process. Yet these ovens have earned 4.6 stars. This is compounded by the fact that Google Maps ignores most memorials. As a case in point, there are thousands of memorials to the victims of national socialism in Germany. Upwards of 80% of them are absent from digital mapping systems, and Google is not alone in this. In Apple Maps, for example, the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, a significant cultural venue in the heart of the city, is marked as a public toilet. The most well-known memorials are listed, often the result of manual additions to Google Maps. Due to the design and its focus on businesses and amenities, though, there is little room for memorial culture to express itself in listings, comments or how information is presentated. Instead, Google Maps is put to use as a platform for Nazi veneration and Holocaust jokes.
via boingboing: Google Maps’ Nazi problem