Content and ads are very different things. Stopping lucrative crypto ads certainly will financially hurt Google, but is definitely a win for consumers. Most crypto advertising is 100% scams. There's a huge difference between letting someone speak their mind on your platform (content) versus accepting money to broadcast their message on your platform (ads).
As for content, that's completely different (and a slippery slope). I won't pick a side on free speech vs protecting people, but I will say I'm very glad I don't have to choose where to draw the line.
They’ve been removing videos from YouTube also. Which they are free to do, it being their platform, but my point is that they are removing content also.
But, to your point: are they? Outside of copyright infringement and downright illegal content, are they really removing any videos? I googled it, and all I found were terrorists and copyright infringement being removed.
I see what you did there :D
Even former Rep Ron Paul's Youtube channel was demonetized--which is frankly just insanely ridiculous.
Meanwhile media reports extremist content such as Nazi propaganda is available?!
Another example is anti-Trump, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.
I'm not exactly sure who can be said is being "protected" by retaliating against Paul and Shapiro?
It's their platform, but without either competition or regulation they're quickly becoming an unreasonable Thought Police.
1-https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xw5bxk/youtube-ne...
Google is very loathe to remove videos. I haven't seen that often, outside of copyright infringement or something truly illegal.
Demonetization is different. It's basically saying "we'll let you talk... But we don't want to reward you and charge our advertisers for it". It's a hugely slippery slope, of course, but... It's one thing to demand free speech (which Google isn't legally required to allow), yet a completely different thing to demand Google pay people they disagree with.
The top parent comment was not making a legal "demand" but was expressing concern and hope for a fair competitor to arise which treated different viewpoints in a neutral manner.
> "ads not content"
Nevertheless many content producers rely on ads to sustain themselves, and so by unfairly demonitizing viewpoints google/facebook disagrees with, the argument can be made they are doing evil. And especially considering their power as gatekeepers of the modern avenue of public discourse, we should be very concerned about them picking sides, especially for topics with a political component.
perhaps all channels with political goals (candidates, parties) should be demonetized.
Most of the media is owned by a small number of corporations and they want you to get your ideas and info from them.
Right now, no one is responsible for the poisonous mixture of fake-news / radicalizing context coupled with attention based internet economy where the only incentive an internet content business has is to grab more and more eyeballs. Google (and others) simply shirk their failures by claiming "to give users what they want", when instead their employees are busy devising more and more elaborate ways to grab someone's eyeballs.
Who decides what’s fake news. Trump said there was problems in Sweden. NYTimes called him out on it. Not even a year later they are writing about the problems in Sweden.
So was the fake news trumps comment? Or the denile and lying by the media?
Maybe we should just censor everything. Censor trump, the media, advertising, everything. Not like the media is worth a grain of salt these days.
I am concerned by this trend. Instead of more open and more honest reporting in mainstream media, the governments try to silence those who post controversial stories - even when they are true, or at least not any more false than "accepted" news.
[Trump's comment about Sweden was false in the sense that "last night" nothing very unusual happened in Sweden; it was true in the sense that every night there were some things that you wouldn't expect from a country that has been so stable for so long as Sweden has, even though the claims about "civil war" in Sweden are highly exaggerated.]
This is the consequence of the nature of the beast: a broadcast platform that lives off of advertisements. You can't force Google to not do what their advertisers want.
I see no reason at this time why those with advertiser-unfriendly viewpoints can set up alternative platforms, that do not necessarily need to cater to big-corporate advertisers. At this point (at least in the United States), you don't have the situation in some nations where there is just one viewpoint (the state media) and alternative opinions are silenced not by demonitization, but by police/army force.
It's exactly this line of thinking that got us here. This 'private business' is a lot of people doing the same thing (in this case censoring things, as much as I hate ads, this is censorship). But people who use their products can't organize themselves in this way (they are not a single entity) and can't boycott them when shit like that happens. They can't leave independently either since it puts each of them them at a disadvantage ("everyone else is using it").
That's why Google must be slapped as hard as possible here - because they are nearly a monopoly.
No. They can't. Countries have laws that regulate what companies can and can't do. That's why so many companies have had to pay fines in the past. To assert that "private business ... can do what they want" deteriorates democracies and the rule of law.
update: My comment is not about if Google did right or wrong, or if it's legal or not for them to ban cryptocurrency ads. My comment it's just a response to the parent about how private companies "can do what they want". Sorry for writing a comment so open to misinterpretation. I hope this clarification helps.
There is neither law nor regulation in the United States or California demanding that advertising be accepted and served outside of certain limited scenarios, such as elections. Anticompetitive concerns are handled via other means and do not apply. So, yes. They can. And their doing so doesn’t undermine democracy in any sense. If you believe this incorrect, the courts are at your disposal.
Do you have any idea how often the networks reject television advertising, by the way? One national spot I worked on took five tries to be accepted for air. Advertising media needs a rejection mechanism (else you’d get Bud Light ads on the Disney channel), and citing a civics lesson to lament it is just silly.
It's probably not YouTube demonitizing content that they personally find disagreeable. It's most likely advertisers that find it disagreeable that their ads show up next to objectionable content: advertisers don't control precisely which videos their ads show up next to - they just target them to certain types of content. So advertisers need to have confidence in Google's decisions that ad-enabled content is reasonably appropriate for them. Instead, advertisers will threaten to pull their ads from Google's platforms entirely if it doesn't self-police adequately in terms of deciding which content is allowed on the platform and ad-enabled.
That was really the controversy with Logan Paul. He had top-tier status with YouTube (Google Preferred) meaning that YouTube positioned his channel as suitable for advertising from the biggest, most risk-averse brands, and those brands flipped out about the potential of appearing before his suicide forest video. See https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/youtube-changes-partne...
> In addition, YouTube said all videos in Google Preferred — representing the top 5% most-viewed channels — will be reviewed by human moderators before they’re monetized. YouTube also is rolling out a three-tiered “suitability system” for advertisers to select their level of comfort with content they’re buying ads against.
If advertisers were generally happy to have their content show up alongside any sort of videos, then YouTube might as well. There's another aspect of this which is YouTube kicking content off their platform that isn't even monetized at all, but that probably relates to the same problem again, where advertisers wouldn't want to monetize on a platform that's known for hosting objectionable content generally. (Porn sites don't tend to run a lot of mainstream ads, for example.)
Note that this description is intended to be a positive analysis of Google's probable behavior, not a normative defense of it. From a free speech perspective it's unfortunate that so many content policies are ultimately advertising-driven, but advertisers are the ones paying for most of the platform (with the exception of subscribers like to YouTube Red which are probably a minority of users).
One example would be the Stop Funding Hate pressure group who very loudly and aggressively by social media, campaigns to companies to stop advertising within The Daily Mail newspaper in the UK.
It certainly would still be extremely unlikely that a victim would be successful in suing Google for damages of a trap they stepped into due to Google-supplied ads (just imagine what that would mean for kickstarter...), but chances of getting caught are not the line between right and wrong.
This kind of an argument shows up every time Google or Facebook or some other megacorp does something detrimental to free speech. It would be a reasonable thing to say if they didn't control millions of conversations every day, show millions of ads to millions of people, and so on. When a company has a budget that would put it in the 20 biggest economies in the world if it were a country, this kind of a statement no longer applies. It doesn't matter that it's privately owned, its very existence impacts the lives of most people in most developed countries in the world, if it infringes on free speech, it should be regulated.