I suspect the recent blocking of ads on LGBT video creators is part of Googles response to this.
It's rather hard to pick a subset of videos which no advertisers consider offensive. Social norms in one country might vary widely from another country or culture.
It looks like Google is getting criticized from both sides here, and there is no middle ground.
Google should give censorship the middle finger, while also giving advertisers more control over where their ads play. Categorization is good, censorship isn't.
He probably meant, that Google should give more precise targeting options. For example, I want to spend my ad dollars on Youtube, but I might want to not advertise for example on extreme right-wing (or on cultural marxists, for that matter) videos.
If an advertiser doesn't want to reach viewers on the largest and most concentrated video market on Earth then that's their own internal problem they need to deal with.
This is the brave new world. The free-market of information is beginning to show its teeth for better or worse and those who shy away from it will lose market share.
No, he isn't. He said the advertisers should decide what they spend money on, so Google doesn't have to care about what other people might consider offensive (i.e. 'flipping the bird to censorship')
Exactly. Google doesn't realize that it wields an incredible amount of power in this situation. If these guys don't advertise than someone else will. They will win, these idiots will lose.
Advertising is a surprisingly concentrated market, with five or six conglomerates making most of ads you see (WPP, Publicis, Mccain, etc.)
In fact this whole brewhaha was started because the current head of the WPP said he wanted Google to do something about his ads showing up next to extremist videos. It's not inconceivable the article on The Times that started it all was made as part of WPP's strategy to make Google kowtow to them on this subject.
Basically don't underestimate the power of advertising agencies. They can produce news cycles at will.
I agree, give them all the control they need to keep their ads or content disassociated with the undesirable corners of the site but unless actual crimes are being committed we shouldn't have any videos being taken down for anything. Censorship of content on YouTube is the digital equivalent of burning books.
Google is a company, their responsibility is to their investors and shareholders to make money. It is not for them to risk other peoples money in favor of some principle.
Economic politics is for the government and society to play with, not individual mega-corps.
Honest question, other than the fact that courts haven't actually said so, where is the difference between an extremist video including acts of violence and the material that is already illegal?
Created by harming others? Same.
Is a threat to society? Same.
Goes against cultural norms? Almost same (those in the US are far more accepting of fake violence, but real videos of people being murdered tends to be quite taboo).
One includes violence, the other includes sexual violence. But any argument for banning or allowing one seems to be a very close fit to the other.
I don't intend to put up a straw man, I'd like to know why you think my examples are a straw man.
Content classification is something you must do if you're a major content provider in the US, period. Saying someone should just "let the advertisers sort it out" means you're not addressing the type of content classification we're discussing here: per-user, not per-advertiser. Porn & CP are extreme examples, but so are violent extremist videos.
Fourth Amendment has been trashed and killed by the previous two administrations. With all of NSA and FBI's "interpretations" of what reasonable spying means for an investigation, the 4th just doesn't do much anymore to protect people's privacy. Most of the judges either haven't figured out what's happening and how the agencies use their new tools or they are complicit.
The Fifth Amendment is now getting killed at the federal court level, and I'm not sure what are the chances for the current or even future Supreme Court setup are to revert this.
And now we're watching the First Amendment die in slow motion, too, both from attacks of the current administration, which basically says that the 1st amendment is a bad thing and "makes us weak", as well as from all the different groups out there who seem to "take offense" for everything that happens, and want to be in "safe spaces."
And because the media is consolidated in a few large companies and all they care about is profits, it's easy to take down content that "offends" various groups.
Which means they're getting advertisement wrong. I know, it might sound ridiculous given the huge amount of expertise Google has accumulated over years. However, that kind of ad placement mismatch can be a sign that the current advertisement approach (which originated from 90s) on YouTube is outdated and no longer effective. Such misplacement would never happen in Facebook or LinkedIn groups where advertisers can target audience more precisely.
I'm talking specifically about groups, not general advertisement. Groups are typically rather efficient for targeting, because they consist of people sharing a common interest and this interest is known.
Then I guess I don't understand the relevancy to YouTube. Are you saying that the only way to properly advertise going forward is to private groups and not open content?
They definitely get it wrong but I think they don't care because it is 'good enough' and are not sure how to improve the match making, it probably will get better over time of course as software always does. Up until recently I was getting ads for Muslim dating sites showing up on YouTube. I am not Muslim, and I am not interested in dating, and never searched for anything to do with this. I suspect they showed up because I watch some Bollywood music videos on occasion. The algorithms are not as intelligent as I once thought, they seem to go with a 'good enough' approach. Bollywood is a subset of the Indian film industry, 88% or so of people in India are not Muslim, also I live in the UK and I am a westerner of Indian origin (so likely a minority of traffic) but they must also get traffic or interest in these videos from Pakistan and others and think, good enough relevance, insert ad.
Hang on. The LGBT stuff was about "restricted mode", not ads. Parents use this mode to reduce the risk of their children watching minecraft videos full of swearing. YT users flag content, and YT uses those flags as part of the filter mechanism. Flags, obviously, can be used by people who think LGBT content is not suitable for children.
I think you misunderstand the "blocking". The videos are only filtered with Restricted mode turned on. They are not blocked unless you opt-in to restricted which many schools, parents, etc. may choose to do.
Has nothing to do with just plain visiting YouTube.com
Restricted mode was released in 2010 so it's not new. It's an opt-in setting and only 1.5% of people use it. Compare that to the percent of people using ad blockers.
For people who can't stand inappropriate videos, the alternative is not using youtube altogether, which would be even worse for ad revenue. So introducing restricted mode helps ad revenue. Obviously whether the creator of a video is LGBT or not should not affect restriction, and it appears youtube might be breaking that. But the affect is quite small because very few people use restricted mode.
It's also the only thing schools have got now they removed youtube for schools. We just force restricted on and block anything extra the old fashioned way.
Right, turning on restricted mode removes many LGBT-related videos - and includes many too.
It's a hard problem for a computer to figure out which LGBT videos to keep in restricted mode. A video called "I'm gay, here's how I do my hair and makeup" is probably okay. A video called "Look at this gay hair and makeup!" is probably being used for bullying if it's getting passed around at a school that uses restricted mode.
If it's a hard problem that might result in classing as objectionable a historically oppressed group of people, then maybe don't do it?
The problem is that YouTube wants to have its cake and eat it too, pretending that they care about social issues, while really being willing to do anything for their bottom line.
Every classification system has false positives and false negatives. Just because something is blocked, doesn't mean it's objectionable. And it especially doesn't mean that the person who created the video is objectionable.
The alternatives are: schools completely block youtube, preventing kids from getting a lot of information, including LGBT information. Or creating an opt-in restricted mode that will inevitably have false positives, blocking kids from seeing some portion of the information. At least in the second case kids have access to a portion of the LGBT information.
AdWords is still like 80% of Google's ads revenue though, and it has no problem of mismatch.
However point is, they are not gone completely. Big advertisers have a much bigger say in business than people would usually think. I won't be surprised that Google might have dedicated agent or group of agents deal with advertisers like AT&T.
So I guess, next Google will prioritize more aggressive censoring tools to please them.
Most commenters here appear to think that Google is holding all the cards over these poor schmucks like ATT, but I think you're onto something. Google might be a force of nature, but their income stream is and has always been vulnerable. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to bend on this much more than HN thinks.
Consumers create the content they consume now. Big brands that decide they need to opt out of Youtube also need to opt out of Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. Upon doing so, they will be forgotten.
Ben Thompson at Stratechery has had a lot of thoughtful things to say about brands and their relationship to television. It was a virtuous cycle not just for mega brands and content producers but also retail. Internet advertising disrupted that. ( Good read: https://stratechery.com/2016/dollar-shave-club-and-the-disru... )
On another note, I've been wondering for years how long it would be until advertisers would decide maybe they don't want their brands pre-rolling in front of snuff films on Daily Mail and other curated news platforms.
The "extremist" videos in question here aren't exactly niche. Some have 30 million views. Thats fairly mainstream.
I watched a few (with english translations), and while they are religious in nature, the few I sampled didn't seem anything out of the ordinary for youtube.
Exactly this. The screenshot in the article shows two women holding a black flag with writing in a language I assume is Arabic. They don't bother to translate what the flag says.
Curiously, a decidedly tech-unsavvy publication from where I live, described this event as "companies are boycotting YouTube because extremist videos are displayed alongside their ads."
Which unintentionally describes YouTube as what it actually is.
Presumably, YouTube at least wants you to think the videos are the main feature and the ads are just a small add-on, so you would expect the article to say "companies are boycotting YouTube because their ads are displayed along side extremist videos." The wording the author quoted makes it sound like the ads are the main featured content.
To be fair, it can't possibly be easy for Google work out what ads are appropriate for what content. I mean some will be easy like a crap music video and Beats, but there are some videos that just aren't ad material.
"Ok we've got a large topless woman covered in slogans, holding a sign, and screaming at a crowd. Maybe.... Nescafe?"
Context is difficult but maybe if you can't establish an easy context, you don't run ads from major buyers.
Another option is separating classes of customers into major buyers like AT&T and everyone else -- AT&T's ads only go onto curated and high reputation channels.
AT&T and other advertisers frankly seem to have not understood the risk of a site which plays their ads on videos that anyone in the world can upload. Or, they have tolerated or controlled the risk up until now and ads + terrorist videos have become a big enough news story that Google has been made into the fall guy.
If 98% of flagged videos are reviewed with 24 hours, it raises the question of why these videos are not getting deleted. Are they not getting flagged? Is google not reviewing them quickly enough? Are they not really as objectionable as the advertisers claim (as londons_explore's comment alludes to)?
I suspect there's a vast grey area between what's actually against the terms of service and what some companies want their ads shown next to. For example, a video calling for Muslims to return to the middle East to fight in the jihad, with no actual graphic content, might not violate the TOS, but British Airways probably doesn't want their ad in the same zip code as that.
But why disable ads on a video that doesn't violate ToS? What they need is a "religious content" category, so people can choose not to have their videos there.
I mean, I think that disabling those ads is the entire point here. Ads are showing up on videos that don't violate the TOS but that advertisers don't want to be associated with. If 98% of the videos in question are getting reviewed anyway Google has a simple meatspace solution.
Google seems to think algorithms can solve everything
As in the case of maps, it is clearly not the case. They actually need humans, with critical sense (those are more expensive) to check case by case
Videos can also get input from the users but a) this is prone for abuse and b) they need better inputs than like/not like and bad cases are harder to report
Google has a tracking record of not giving support and relying on the community for Q&A. Which means there is no real answers to different concerns. Some solutions exist but Tom from Minnesota or John from New York give bad responses and someone else trust them because these answers are in the Google support site.
Surely companies enter into these agreements knowing what service Google will provide for them, right? On top of that, I don't think many people believe even Google has the technology and resources to scan every bit of content they show and determine if it's "extreme"--according to a particular company.
This is a case of companies catching flak from potential customers for being associated with something offensive to those vocal customers, and wanting to distance themselves from it. So they try to shoot the messenger: Google/Youtube.
They either knew what they were getting into when they signed the contract (because "We'll give you money. Just shove our company down the gullet of the public."), or they're inept.
I don't think that the response is entirely unreasonable; Google doesn't have to comply if they don't want to, and it will just be a game of who flinches first after that.
It's not really unprecedented to request a change in policy or to try to influence a service you're using. I agree with you that this should just be an accepted cost of algorithm based advertising, but I don't see the response as particularly unreasonable. The companies want a change in how it works, and they're trying to throw their financial weight behind it.
I mean, it's not like they're suing to break contract, they're just not continuing to use the product because it no longer is serving their needs.
I'm really not trying to be a corporate apologist here - whether their ads are there or not I won't see them so I frankly don't care. But I'm not sure why there is a condescending attitude towards the corporations for trying to make a change, and then stopping use of a product they deem to no longer meet their needs.
Totally understood, and agreed: companies are allowed to use (or not) whatever services they want, and they will ask for whatever they want.
My original comment was made to point out: they got what they (should have) expected, and now they're dealing with damage control. Which I would fully expect them to do.
Conspiracy theory, this is related to the changing dynamics of popular media. These advertisers are actually concerned about money going to non-approved media sources. The extremists videos are a happy coincidence / excuse for them to act on.
With all the ad profiling and targeting going on, is it really a coincidence that certain ads appear next to somewhat extreme content? Maybe some brands and extremist groups do share the same audience?
That fact can be hard to swallow for the marketing department of a company: 'Apparently 80 percent of our customers are white supremacists or hate gays.' Or something like: 'It seems that 1 in 3 of our shampoo buyers like beheading videos.'
Consequently those companies pulling advertising on Google and YouTube should stop selling their products and services to extremist or similar inappropriate customers. Or put a disclaimer on their products or in their TOS: 'This product can not be sold to, or used by, viewers of beheading videos, Muslim extremists, Paul Ryan voters or Breitbart readers.'
The internet is a medium of communication like air and should not be subject to advertiser brand management. Advertising really shouldnt even be the primary method of financing; it should all be paid for with some sort of tax.
> it should all be paid for with some sort of tax.
Which in practice works out as the state deciding what things should and should not be funded and, therefore, seen. Even if the current global political climate was not so awful I would still think this is a terrible idea.
The term is applied broadly to mean both works which argue that the holocaust did not even happened and those that challenge certain historical claims. It's a loaded phrase, used to cut off any possible discussion of the topic.
One example, please, of a decent scholarly work that Amazon has removed. All I see is a bunch of fringe, shoddy, anti-semitic, real holocaust denial garbage.
1984 is in very large part about historical revisionism. If anything, the term "holocaust denier" is the opposite of Orwellian, in that it specifically stigmatizes revisionism.
> many victims of the Holocaust were non-Jewish, and that the association of the Holocaust with "anti-Semitic" fails to represent all the other groups who were also targeted ... In our current political climate, those advocates are called antisemitic bigots and Holocaust deniers along with ISIS
> You're also called a bigot if you point out that most people conflate the total number of people who died in the Holocaust with the number of Jewish people who died in the Holocaust.
Can you substantiate this?
Maybe I'm just socially blind, but I've never seen or heard of anyone labeled a bigot just for citing statistics. I mean, the Wikipedia page on holocaust victims literally features a big ass pie chart with the demographic breakdown and nobody seems to be contesting it.
I call BS on this. I looked at the list of books removed by Amazon, and they are straight up Holocaust denial (e.g., The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, The Myth of the Six Million, The Holocaust Hoax Exposed). I feel dirtied just googling that shit.
My history books from school reported on the inclusions of gypsies and gays in the Holocaust without being labelled holocaust denial. This sounds like a red herring.
I'm sorry, but calling a holocaust denier a denier doesn't stigmatize inquiry. There is no "both sides" here. The holocaust is a fact, documented by many first person accounts on both sides as well as physical evidence, much of which can be experienced by the remains of several of the camps.
You could debate some of the numbers - was it at the lower end of the estimate or the higher end, but pretending that there is any legitimate reason to claim that the holocaust didn't happen is denying fact.
Yes it does. Does Amazon remove "the earth is flat" books? Anything is up for discussion. Does Amazon remove "humans should be able to have sex with animals" books? I'm sure theres at least a few. Thats the principle of free speech. Claiming "heresy" and lashing out violently is what children do. You dont have to buy the book.
Just because you mix a smattering of fact with logical fallacy does not make it legitimate, yet people believe it... if that doesn't fit the bill of "propaganda" I don't know what does.
Depends on if you are referring to main news programs during the day or the opinion shows in the evening. Clearly the latter is going to be biased, but the news programs during the day is just facts as far as I can tell (I only see it in the airports since I don't have cable).
> if that doesn't fit the bill of "propaganda" I don't know what does.
This election was a big switcheroo. Historically, FoxNews (FauxNews) had very biased coverage and not much balance. Now CNN has taken their place. Their webpage reads like a scandal sheet. Everything that Trump or the Republicans do is wrong. On Fox you'll see some criticism of Trump.
I think it's explained by the fact Fox was always ambivalent about Trump because there's a base/establishment split in the Republican Party. CNN was "all in" against him from the beginning.
Not really... Sean Hanity, one of fox's biggest draws, was arguably actively campaigning for Trump.
> had very biased coverage and not much balance. Now CNN has taken their place. Their webpage reads like a scandal sheet.
Yes CNN has become infotainment, MSNBC is slightly better. Your comparing having an agenda (CNN) to outright spin, refusing to cover relevant topics (Fox).
CNN looks like a scandal sheet because we have had nothing but scandals and controversy for the last 100 days.
They could definitely lower the search results and could definitely show the competitors if you searched for them without reprimand I believe. I remember when Google put google flights over competitors there was some legal action by the FTC but it was dropped [0].
I think ramifications would be very serious for Google, since they rely on public trust and good will. There is little barrier to switching search engines and many alternatives.
It's rather hard to pick a subset of videos which no advertisers consider offensive. Social norms in one country might vary widely from another country or culture.
It looks like Google is getting criticized from both sides here, and there is no middle ground.