Official Google Canada Blog: February 2022

Black on the Prairies: Carol LaFayette-Boyd’s Story

Monday, February 7, 2022

Editor's note:

LaFayette-Boyd, a Master’s Canada Athletics competitor, atop the podium at a track and field meet.

Black History Month is an opportunity for all of us to learn about the wide range of Black experiences, and the vital role our community has played throughout Saskatchewan’s shared history for over 100 years. As many of my relatives - especially the younger generation - do not look like me, I want them to be proud of our African heritage and all the contributions of people of African descent.
In my growing up days we were referred to as various forms of the N-word and ‘Coloured’. I didn’t know us as Black until the Black is Beautiful and Black Power movements came in in the late 1960s.
My dad’s parents came to Regina from Iowa in 1906. My dad, Karl, was born in Regina in 1907. They homesteaded out near Rosetown – west of Saskatoon in 1911. My mom’s grandparents came to Canada in 1910 from Oklahoma. That year, over 200 people arrived from Oklahoma to Maidstone and Amber Valley, where my great grandparents went. I was born on a farm. There were five born before me and the only one born in a hospital was our second brother who was born in June and it was easy to get there. There was no running water or electricity, but growing up on the farm leaves me with nothing but good memories of fun and harmony. Although, now I cannot go for more than 24 hours without running water.

What it was like being the only Black family and lessons learned Being the sixth-born child in my family, it seems that I was protected from name calling as my siblings had taken care of that already. They were always the fastest at track meets held with other communities and it was heard “run N-word run.” My parents taught me the saying that “sticks and stones will break your bones, but names will never hurt you”. I really took that to heart. They told me that the N-word meant the person felt bad about themselves, so put others down. I looked it up in the dictionary and saw it meant “Stupid person” (but think now I was looking at a different word) – I knew I wasn’t a stupid person so those calling me that felt that way about themselves. As a result, I never felt inferior to others; although I know at times I was treated as inferior to others. In my work in particular, I saw discrimination towards minorities and women and did my best to stand up against it.

Life in SchoolAfter my mom passed away, we moved to Regina where my Dad had found work after leaving the farm. In 1956, I was starting grade 9 and I found out many years later that my teacher had instructed the kids to be nice to me. She had not told them that I was Black. I was the only Black student in the six high schools in the city until grade 12 that I know of. There had been other people of African ancestry in Regina, but had left to live in either Calgary or Winnipeg where there was better opportunity for employment.
One thing that most of us of African descent learned early on in life was that you had to give 200% in whatever you were trying to accomplish whether in school, work, sports, etc. in order to be accepted before others who might only give 50% effort and then the acceptance may not have come anyway. That is not unfamiliar to what many women have faced in competition for work. So a Black woman is facing double barriers. Because of affirmative action rules, hopefully that is changing.
As a person of African descent, I have always seen myself as a member of the human race and while living in Canada, that was my identity. However, when I lived in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was always aware that I was Black. That did change until after Barack Obama was voted in as President. That moment made it feel like “now we are all members of the human race”.
I think it is important to know and understand history so we will build on what is good and not repeat what isn’t.

David Archer: Reflections from an Anti-Racist Psychotherapist

Thursday, February 3, 2022

Editor's note: This Black History Month, we’re highlighting Black perspectives, and sharing stories from Black Googlers, partners, and culture shapers from across Canada.

David Archer is an anti-racist psychotherapist, EMDRIA certified EMDR consultant, clinical social worker, couples and family therapist, and mindfulness meditator from Montreal, Canada (Tiohtià:ke). He is an expert clinician who works in private practice with diverse clinical populations. Mr. Archer provides individual and group consultations to other therapists, and presents internationally for conferences, companies, and community organizations. He specializes in efficient psychotherapeutic interventions that are designed to maintain long-lasting changes. He previously authored the highly acclaimed book, audiobook, and eBook called Anti-Racist Psychotherapy: Confronting Systemic Racism and Healing Racial Trauma as well as the follow-up book for personal care called Black Meditation: Ten Practices for Self-Care, Mindfulness, and Self-Determination.

Twenty years ago, I was a software engineer. I was fascinated with the ability to transmute lines of code into complex software. Programmers are interested in finding solutions to the endless barrage of error messages that obstruct our everyday apps and platforms. Currently, I am an anti-racist psychotherapist. In this field we also search for logic; within every client’s mind lies a solution that explains the errors they encounter in their lives. The clinician’s job is to elicit solutions. By deciphering the logic of the psyche, we move people to acknowledge their innate gifts and confront the suffering caused by the challenges of living in an imperfect social structure.

My clinical experiences led me to the following understanding: anti-Black racism is like a trauma response. Much like the trauma survivor who avoids the source of their injury, the racist operates on the basis of a survival response: a fight, flight, or freeze reaction unconsciously activated to deal with a perceived threat to their insecure power structure.

Within the social structure, racism can never be resolved by attending simple workshops, changing profile pictures on social media, or by corporations providing a superficial interest toward people with darker skin complexions. These kinds of performances only placate political interests rather than eradicating social problems. We require systemic interventions to address our overburdened and defunded health care system. There is an urgent need to transform our society into one that views mental health as a human right; and our leaders must understand the importance of anti-racism to encourage an unremitting conviction towards systemic and substantive change.

When you hear people say that African-Canadians descended from enslaved people, there is an error in this logic. It refers to the trauma but not to who they were before the traumatization of European colonization. The ancestral Black mother of the human species, “mitochondrial Eve,” lived approximately 200,000 years ago on the African continent. Therefore, the Maafa, the centuries long atrocities of chattel slavery, cannot be seen as the beginning of our story. This is because humanity spent more millennia being melanated in the motherland.

Thousands of years ago white people descended from the continent of Africa. This provokes an error in the white consciousness so the construct of race is necessary to divide our shared humanity. The only reason why they created a concept of race was to make a group of humans less human. Race was meant to dehumanize groups of people in order to justify genocide, cultural imperialism, and racial capitalism. Stealing the land from Indigenous people, robbing Africans from their own continent, and dissociating from our common origins are ways of reinforcing the deep multigenerational trauma that pervades our society.

There is a higher chance of being traumatized depending on your social identity. Women face gendered violence at a higher rate and people of colour experience colourism differently from one another. Regardless of our labels, all people can heal. My main approach is called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy. But anti-racist psychotherapy is not limited to EMDR; there are a range of approaches that are neuro-affective in nature, or even community based, that still utilize therapeutic memory reconsolidation. When we try something different, changes can happen.

When people begin to reprocess their racial trauma, the goal is not to force them to stop identifying with their race, but to cultivate radical self-acceptance, revolutionary self-love, and a courageous commitment to improving their community. I have helped people to recover even with the odds stacked against them. In recent years, we have improved mental health awareness and have identified improved forms of trauma treatment. In the next few years we must develop the technology to decolonize our psychotherapy, to target higher order problems in our society, and help our families to break the generational cycles that have plagued them.

I am old enough to remember not having social media and never hearing of an anti-racist psychotherapist. Imagine what the next 20 years will hold? My job is to help people to make changes in their lives. Once a programmer, always a programmer, debugging through error messages is a life’s work for me. But we need to upgrade our technology. There is a collective responsibility to heal from the trauma of our nations, societies, and families. Healing starts from a simple acknowledgment and sometimes the path can reveal itself. As our technology continues to stimulate our minds, let us have the courage to elevate our hearts as well.

About David Archer:
His philosophies are informed by mindfulness, intersectional feminism, and critical race theory. He provides mental health services practice using EMDR, Brainspotting, EFT, and other mind-body strategies which utilize memory reconsolidation and working memory taxation methods. Areas of interest relate to working with individuals who have suffered from PTSD, racial trauma, minority stress, addictions, relational conflict, and eating disorders. Mr. Archer is an ally of LGBTQ, Black, Indigenous, and oppressed people of color around the world.
He is also the recent author of a book called Anti-Racist Psychotherapy: Confronting Systemic Racism and Healing Racial Trauma (available here) and Black Meditation: Ten Practices for Self-Care, Mindfulness, and Self-Determination (available here).

Maps 101: How Google Maps reviews work

Wednesday, February 2, 2022

With millions of reviews posted every day from people around the world, we have around-the-clock support to keep the information on Google relevant and accurate. Much of our work to prevent inappropriate content is done behind the scenes, so we wanted to shed some light on what happens after you hit “post” on a review.

How we create and enforce our policies
We’ve created strict content policies to make sure reviews are based on real-world experiences and to keep irrelevant and offensive comments off of Google Business Profiles.
As the world evolves, so do our policies and protections. This helps us guard places and businesses from violative and off-topic content when there’s potential for them to be targeted for abuse. For instance, when governments and businesses started requiring proof of COVID-19 vaccine before entering certain places, we put extra protections in place to remove Google reviews that criticize a business for its health and safety policies or for complying with a vaccine mandate.
Once a policy is written, it’s turned into training material — both for our operators and machine learning algorithms — to help our teams catch policy-violating content and ultimately keep Google reviews helpful and authentic.

Moderating reviews with the help of machine learning
As soon as someone posts a review, we send it to our moderation system to make sure the review doesn’t violate any of our policies. You can think of our moderation system as a security guard that stops unauthorized people from getting into a building — but instead, our team is stopping bad content from being posted on Google.

Given the volume of reviews we regularly receive, we’ve found that we need both the nuanced understanding that humans offer and the scale that machines provide to help us moderate contributed content. They have different strengths so we continue to invest tremendously in both.

Machines are our first line of defense because they’re good at identifying patterns. These patterns often immediately help our machines determine if the content is legitimate, and the vast majority of fake and fraudulent content is removed before anyone actually sees it.

Our machines look at reviews from multiple angles, such as:

The content of the review: Does it contain offensive or off-topic content?
The account that left the review: Does the Google account have any history of suspicious behavior?
The place itself: Has there been uncharacteristic activity — such as an abundance of reviews over a short period of time? Has it recently gotten attention in the news or on social media that would motivate people to leave fraudulent reviews?

Training a machine on the difference between acceptable and policy-violating content is a delicate balance. For example, sometimes the word “gay” is used as a derogatory term, and that’s not something we tolerate in Google reviews. But if we teach our machine learning models that it’s only used in hate speech, we might erroneously remove reviews that promote a gay business owner or an LGBTQ+ safe space. Our human operators regularly run quality tests and complete additional training to remove bias from the machine learning models. By thoroughly training our models on all the ways certain words or phrases are used, we improve our ability to catch policy-violating content and reduce the chance of inadvertently blocking legitimate reviews from going live.

If our systems detect no policy violations, then the review can post within a matter of seconds. But our job doesn’t stop once a review goes live. Our systems continue to analyze the contributed content and watch for questionable patterns. These patterns can be anything from a group of people leaving reviews on the same cluster of Business Profiles to a business or place receiving an unusually high number of 1 or 5-star reviews over a short period of time.

Keeping reviews authentic and reliable
Like any platform that welcomes contributions from users, we also have to stay vigilant in our efforts to prevent fraud and abuse from appearing on Maps. Part of that is making it easy for people using Google Maps to flag any policy-violating reviews. If you think you see a policy-violating review on Google, we encourage you to report it to our team. Businesses can report reviews on their profiles here, and consumers can report them here.

Our team of human operators works around the clock to review flagged content. When we find reviews that violate our policies, we remove them from Google and, in some cases, suspend the user account or even pursue litigation.

In addition to reviewing flagged content, our team proactively works to identify potential abuse risks, which reduces the likelihood of successful abuse attacks. For instance, when there’s an upcoming event with a significant following — such as an election — we implement elevated protections to the places associated with the event and other nearby businesses that people might look for on Maps. We continue to monitor these places and businesses until the risk of abuse has subsided to support our mission of only publishing authentic and reliable reviews. Our investment in analyzing and understanding how contributed content can be abused has been critical in keeping us one step ahead of bad actors.

With more than 1 billion people turning to Google Maps every month to navigate and explore, we want to make sure the information they see — especially reviews — is reliable for everyone. Our work is never done; we’re constantly improving our system and working hard to keep abuse, including fake reviews, off of the map.

Posted by Ian Leader Product Lead, User Generated Content

Roger Mooking on Black History Month in Canada

Tuesday, February 1, 2022

Editor's note: This Black History Month, we’re highlighting Black perspectives, and sharing stories from Black Googlers, partners, and culture shapers from across Canada.

Roger Mooking is host of Man Fire Food and Wall of Chefs judge on Food Network Canada

Black History Month has meant many things to me over the years, and my relationship to it changes almost annually. In my formative years growing up in Edmonton, Alberta, Black History Month was a welcome anomaly from my day- to- day reality and something I embraced like a Kardashian to a selfie. Since then, I’ve felt all the emotions for this month, ranging from pride to disdain smeared with a trailer load of aloofness. It’s complicated. It is necessary and important to recognize our heroes and educate every generation. The other side of this algebraic equation has me perpetually asking “who has granted us this opportunity,” given there is an undeniable power-play in this dynamic. There is no “white history month” because well…that history will never be relegated at all and certainly not designated to 28 (9 with a leap year) days of the 365 day calendar.

Mooking is best known as the host of grilling and barbecue show Man Fire Food on Food Network Canada and Cooking Channel. The popular travelling food series showcases a dynamic range of live fire cooking, including whole hog barbecue, lobster boils, Hawaiian emu’s, seafood roasts and more!

BHM always serves as a great reminder when companies and media outlets who don't reach out the other 11 months of the year call during Black History Month for a contribution from people who got that melanin poppin’. Recently, I’ve observed many more Black faces in front of the camera, and this welcome representation is not something I grew up seeing and it is certainly valuable for the most impressionable formative age Black minds. Unfortunately, although significant, it often feels like performance art as I don’t see the same commitment to that type of representation behind the scenes, in the boardrooms and in the executive levels of these same outlets. This reminder strengthens my resolve to continue doing what I do to level the playing field, which is constantly shifting. Me and my team occupy boardrooms, television sets, creative spaces, studios, and work in a variety of teams in front of, and behind the camera. We are always having to manage the creative commerce minefield with a balance of firm resolve, challenging discourse, and good old fun having.

Over the years, Mooking has garnered many accolades including the prestigious “Premiers Award” for excellence in the field of Creative Arts and Design, a Gourmand World Cookbook Award, a Socan Classics Award and countless “Best Of” mentions.

It is wholly common, so much so, that it has become our expectation, that I am asked to participate in a campaign “for my perspective,” only to have my perspective being perceived as too niche or not mass market enough. This is when my curry chicken becomes a burger. The confusion is mind numbing because as I walk the streets of this beautiful country, I hear a vast array of languages being spoken, I find authentic restaurants representing every corner of the globe, and see increasing numbers of babies being born of diverse parents. It is very clear, and the statistics support the fact, that the “mass market” and “my perspective” is not what it was when I first arrived in Canada at 5 years old. I’ve observed this shift across the country in major, secondary, and rural communities. Yet, I am still mostly still facing the same discussions in these business environments that I was having 2 decades ago. Although the disconnect is incredibly frustrating, my commitment strengthens with every encounter, as they are numerous and often. Hopefully they will not be as numerous or as often for my kids' kids generation. Maybe by then, dynamics and representation in favour of marginalized communities will shift enough for there to be need for a “white history month” and my daughters will be asking Bill Gates great grandkids how they feel about it.

Official Canada Blog

Black on the Prairies: Carol LaFayette-Boyd’s Story

David Archer: Reflections from an Anti-Racist Psychotherapist

Maps 101: How Google Maps reviews work

Roger Mooking on Black History Month in Canada

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