Google turns off ads for blog after writing about Russia's anti-gay policies | Hacker News Reader

Google turns off ads for blog after writing about Russia's anti-gay policies

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34 pointsspdustin22 comments

The images from VK included in the author's original post are somewhat disturbing. Nothing in this incident is inconsistent with an automated process flagging his article, and a underpaid/overworked reviewer seeing the images without taking time to digest the article in full and concluding "yup, looks like hate speech".

Aside: I helped moderate a (poorly-run) veganism Facebook group for a few months. If I banned everyone who posted pictures of eviscerated animals, I'd have banned half the legitimate members. (There's a certain type of activist that thrives on eliciting visceral reactions from those who already agree with them. I don't get it.) So I can understand how Google's review process could get tripped up by stuff like this.

Really, it was pro vegan people posting the images, not people trying to upset the vegans?

I'm not sure I'll ever understand why people behave the way they do on the internet.

Yup. Like, 10:1 vegan activists to trolls. I had to fight for a "no gory images" policy -- a good third of the members "appreciated" the images.

I don't get it either; I think some people just run on anger. I eventually left the group since it was otherwise poorly run.

This doesn't make any sense. Google, from top-down, is incredibly pro-LGBT. I'm willing to bet $1 that there is some other violation that happened. Or, people who are anti-LGBT(or pro-Russian government) managed to trick google into shutting down the ads on his blog, for example by sending a bunch of fake traffic to it.

That'd what I'd say - considering how pro-LGBT Google are, there's definitely more than the author is letting on here

Agreed. This goes totally against the corporate culture.

I'll bet it was flagged as anti-LGBT and is simply the work of an automated process going wrong.

My money's on this. The pictures in the article exemplifying the hateful VK content make the article itself look like a hate article. If I were a (overworked, underpaid) human reviewer who saw this after an algorithm flagged it, I'd probably have scrolled down to the pictures and tossed it into the "flagged" pile too.

Definitely. But the situation presents itself for self-promotion. I think the author is taking advantage of the situation and making the best of it from their perspective --and Google well, you can't please all of the people all of the time.

everyone supports the censorship of political content they don't like, what comes around goes around

The post Google used as justification is http://americablog.com/2014/02/ny-city-state-pension-plans-l...

I mean, while I in no way support bullying/harassing/assaulting gay people - google didn't suspend them for reporting on what was going on with VK.com. They suspended them for advocating people call and harass the comptroller of New York.

Reporting on an event is one thing. Encouraging people online to call and harass an elected official is something else entirely - and I think it would qualify as harassment.

They said call and register your displeasure. That's far from harassment.

Except that's not what they said. What they DID say is:

>The LGBT rights group is calling on New York City comptroller Scott Stringer, and New York state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, to contact Usmanov and Tavrin, and demand that content depicting, promoting or extolling the abduction of gays, blacks, Jews and others be taken down from VK.com, and that all accounts associated with such materials be deleted.

You're doing yourself no favors by taking liberties with what was said instead of directly quoting the article.

I don't understand, you said: They suspended them for advocating people call and harass the comptroller of New York.

But the sentence you quoted says no such thing, it says that the group itself is "calling on" (which is not the same as "calling") the comptrollers to do something. The group is not advocating that anyone else call them.

TIL comptrollers are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comptroller . I was wondering why everyone was just rolling with the original typo.

> Encouraging people online to call and harass an elected official is something else entirely - and I think it would qualify as harassment

Encouraging people to petition elected officials isn't remotely harassment. That's absurd!

My God, those images are confronting. What kind of hell-hole is Russia that the government would not only allow but excuse that sort of behaviour?

This is just pure speculation on the authors part.

It's not speculation, it's right here in Google's notification: https://twitter.com/aravosis/status/852321786687606784/photo...

It is speculation that the reason is because the guy cares about gay rights.

Google is the true Internet Bully

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