AT&T, other U.S. advertisers quit Google, YouTube over extremist videos
usatoday.com
usatoday.com
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.
I would imagine they will come to some middle ground. Can advertisers afford to not be on YouTube much less AdWords or DoubleClick properties?
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.
I have an anarchist friend who is always posting memes about killing the Queen etc, advertising shows up just fine around that kind of content.
Or does Facebook have a special advertising category for "content in support of ISIS?"
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/60tsu4/twitter_c...
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.
Philosophically, I agree with you, but I'm not sure if it really will work that way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Economic politics is for the government and society to play with, not individual mega-corps.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/20/lgbt-comm...
This mode would obviously take them out of ad impressions as well.
https://youtube-creators.googleblog.com/2017/03/restricted-m...
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 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.
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.
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.
Has nothing to do with just plain visiting YouTube.com
http://nypost.com/2016/06/17/gangbanger-facebook-lives-his-o... http://www.cnn.com/2017/03/21/us/facebook-live-gang-rape-chi...
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.
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.
Is all Arabic content extremist now?
Which unintentionally describes YouTube as what it actually is.
"Ok we've got a large topless woman covered in slogans, holding a sign, and screaming at a crowd. Maybe.... Nescafe?"
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.
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
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.
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.
Thus, you'd expect ads targeted at you to appear on any video you watch, even extremist ones.
This may be quite difficult for Google to 'fix'.
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.'
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.
Looks like extremist videos make internet great again.
They'd sooner delete controversial republican personalities accounts before the confirmed ISIS recruiting accounts
Not that I agree with either, you'd just think the latter would take significantly more precedent
[0] https://www.engadget.com/2015/03/20/ftc-report-google-search...