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Comment by toss1941 | Hacker News Reader

toss1941

Google should give censorship the middle finger, while also giving advertisers more control over where their ads play. Categorization is good, censorship isn't.

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What does this actually mean, though? Advertisers are always free to spend or not spend their dollars as they see fit.

Yeah, but giving them more /fine-grained/ control might make them more likely to spend when they otherwise might not

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.

I thought we were talking about not showing ads on some videos, not takedowns?

What content is actually being censored? Not displaying ads on a video does not mean the video is unavailable.

I mean, sure, ok. Just don't see what that has to do with censorship

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.

Yeah but gp is talking about "flipping the bird to censorship", it isn't censorship to not buy ads. That just isn't what censorship is.

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.

But most advertising (especially video) is not particularly well-measured, and all of the money is in the hands of the brands.

Philosophically, I agree with you, but I'm not sure if it really will work that way.

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.

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.

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.

Pornography, CP, and other things are regulated in the US and they can't legally do what you suggest.

Hello Mr. straw man.

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.

IIRC They can with logged in users that have identified their age as over 18.

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.

First Amendment would be the U.S. Government saying "take down those videos". That's not what's happening.

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