Hacker News Reader

Comment by illvm | Hacker News Reader

No it's not? There is a venerable plethora of pirated content. There are less than 2 dozen presidential candidates. If there is some override table which was manually updated, then the person who updated it, at minimum, did not perform due diligence to ensure that all candidates were listed.

View on HN

Actually there are 791 presidential candidates according to https://ballotpedia.org/Presidential_candidates,_2020#Declar....

Yes, most of them are probably not "real candidates", but Google would be in even hotter water if they tried to predetermine who was and who wasn't a real candidate.

Google spent 3.5 million lobbying so far this year and 21 million last year. They know exactly who is a "real candidate"[0]

[0]https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00006782...

It's not up to them to decide who's real or not. It also opens up an easy to exploit situation where I can just claim to be running for president and I get some whitelist applied and could do some nefarious things.

Are you suggesting that the onus is on Google to be proactive and contact every US political campaign before they try to signup for Ads, or any Google account, to verify names, contacts, CC#s ahead of time?

> There are less than 2 dozen presidential candidates.

Not only are there actually 791 Presidential candidates, but there are 26 (27 if you count one who has only formed an exploratory committee)—that is, more than 2 dozen—that Ballotpedia calls “elected officials or notable public figures”.

https://ballotpedia.org/List_of_registered_2020_presidential...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com