Comment by ntuch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ntuch | Hacker News Reader

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>use that data to show the right ads to the right people

To expand on what you're saying here, YouTube allows offended people to bully them by contacting advertisers and saying things like, "YouTube is putting ads for your company in front of videos about hitler!!" And YouTube just immediately caves to that.

YouTube's response from day one should have been, "no, we don't put ads in front of videos, that's not how this works. This isn't tv where the ad is broadcast whether someone is watching or not. This is a website that plays videos you ask for. We (youtube) have data about you. We (try to) select an ad specifically for you. We did not play that ad for Pepsi because it has anything to do with hitler. We played it because (our data suggested) the ad is relevant to you. And then afterward, we played the Hitler vid because that's what you clicked on."

That seems like such an obvious, slam dunk response to me. I think the reason YouTube didn't push back in that manner is that they welcomed the excuse to start pushing political content they don't like off their platform.

In addition to what you're saying, it feels like YouTube is underestimating their leverage over advertisers. They hold exclusive access rights to either the biggest or second biggest audience for video content in the world. It seems to me that advertisers need YouTube far more than YouTube needs any individual advertiser.

The demonitization policy also seems overly broad. While not wanting to display ads before literal executions makes sense, the blanket bans on profanity or use of brand names are counterproductive. People mostly watch videos from creators they like, or that are similar to videos they've watched before. That means that the content in question isn't objectionable to the viewer themselves, and won't cause them to form a negative association with the advertiser's brand. Advertisers should WANT their content to be next to content that the viewer is positively disposed to, regardless of what that content is.

Except that hitler video is now making money from the pepsi ad. And its not far fetched to say that pepsi is giving money to creators of that video and when pepsi exec find out that that is a thing, they will want to shut it down asap.

PR is not a logical thing because people aren't logical, they are emotional and in that context your logic doesn't mean anything...

Based on what do you think Google is pushing off political context they do not like? We can see the screen here that there is nothing like that. Would suggest your allegation is untrue and Google is doing g nothing like you suggest and is the exact opposite.

On one of the images, they advise the moderators to demonetize controversial content, and then make exceptions for certian controversies (which Google does not feel it would be right to suppress). This is obviously bias; it's the definition of bias. It just doesn't feel like bias to us because if we were made autocrats and instructed to rule as undemocratically as possible, we would enforce the same bias.

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