Google bans two websites from its ad platform over protest articles
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
Google is saying they never demonetized the sites, but instead worked with them to address issues in their comment sections
https://twitter.com/Google_Comms/status/1272997425821540352
https://boingboing.net/2020/06/16/google-bans-the-federalist...
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-blocks-ad-revenue-zer...
At this point we have moved from arguing for taking down false stories to taking down criticism in... A month? That's a little bit insane and scary
And I get that advertisers don't want to run their ads on controversial stories, but the Federalist is all about politics and it is to be expected that ads running there will be... Political, no?
Let's not beat around the bush in terms of language they used.
Once again, we have a company choosing not to do business with another company and allowing it to advertise on its property.
Free market at work, move along.
edit: To expand on that, a statement like "[The media] lied about the Trump campaign colluding with Russia in 2016." is going to be controversial. However because "the media" is such a big umbrella, I'm sure you could find a factually untrue article published about the collusion. It's a bit tautological: if one media source publishes an article saying collusion happened, and another publishes an article saying that collusion didn't happen, one of them has to be wrong. You can decide that without determining whether or not collusion actually happened.
The word lying means an intent to deceive, not just to state something falsely. Being wrong and stating a falsehood vs lying are very different.
So maybe try to be your own devil's advocate, and see if you could see how The Federalist could be accused of lying and be unwelcome on someone else' platform.
The Federalist cited quite a few falsehoods that favored the left. Perhaps you could cite some that favored the right?
Edit: Excluding the few right-wing media outlets, because it's quite obvious to everyone that The Federalist wasn't talking about them here.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/fox-news-...
Someone had to open the images in photoshop, alter them, and then upload them to a website. This isn't a simple lie of omission or a mistake, this is manufactured content to push a right-wing narrative.
Fox News consistently pushed the right-wing line that Coronavirus is a hoax until they were threatened with a lawsuit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifKbwDf51bA
While they were publicly telling their viewers that the virus was a hoax, internally they were implementing remote work and disease control.
Here's a giant list of the ways they've supported conservative political goals while actively working against the left, with citations and source material in the footnotes
Unless you want to place the largest news organization in terms of viewership outside of the media for some reason.
The media (at least in US) appears to be heavily biased.
What I understand this heavily biased post is saying is that the opposing media is so heavily biased that it feels like lying to them.
Is it wrong to say this?
I do not see it right that one media outlet has the power to shut down opposing media outlets.
This is not cool. This is very dangerous.
Google is choosing to not take the Federalists money and doesn’t want to put up Federalists billboards on its property.
Does Google have the right not to accept The Federalists money?
Frame it like that and I think the problem becomes clear.
Edit: I have this backwards, I think my point still stands but I was wrong on the transactional aspect
That's factually incorrect. You have it backwards: Google was giving The Federalist money to advertise digital billboards on The Federalist.
Do they have the legal right to do so? Perhaps, at least until they're declared a utility and regulated, but this probably requires a lawyer to answer, because in some cases political opinions are protected in California.
Now a question for you: do people have the right to be outraged about it, and frightened by the threat Google poses to free communication and thus democracy?
To your other point, yes I most certainly do.
It was not Google that came up with this idea. It was one media outlet that is opposing another media outlet. Google is just a tool in this case.
You are clearly not balanced in your opinion in this matter and you are looking for excuses how to make it look right.
Just to check that we're on the same page, it sounds like you're saying that the Federalist article is lying, because it accuses the press of lying without knowing whether their falsehoods were honest mistakes, as opposed to being malicious. So we should give the "the media" the benefit of the doubt and not accuse them of lying without proof of maliciousness.
I suppose the ironic argument one could make is that The Federalist deserves that same benefit of the doubt when they themselves make poorly substantiated remarks about the media lying. How do we know that their potentially false statement is being made with an intent to deceive? Kind of a lame argument, but I find the idea of it humorous.
However, I think it's reasonable to use the term "lying" without proving an intent to deceive. If a media outlet is willing to publish untruthful things that don't even stand up to the most cursory factchecking, I think it is fair to accuse them of lying. When you have such a cavalier (or perhaps even reckless) attitude towards the truth, I would place those falsehoods under the umbrella of lying.
Google's dominant position in the online advertising industry is allowing them to influence political opinions and they are doing so in favor of mainstream media. That seems worth discussing to me.
Chomsky always says, "Organize!". Organization requires mass involvement. Mass involvement comes when there are masses with same opinions. How would one go about finding masses with same opinions when the mainstream platforms won't allow such opinions to be posted in the first place that they oppose?
Or, indeed, more esoteric stuff. For instance, if you want your ads to appear alongside the sale of tigers or fake sneakers, you should look to another network. Google's one of the stricter ones.
In this case, per the article, the issue was the comments. You can imagine how abhorrent the comments on The Federalist are likely to be.
That's why YouTube operated as a "haven for pedophiles" for years. Ads right next to livestreamed abuse on YouTube? No problem! Harmless edgy right-wing doomsday blog? Rule violation.
It's a perfectly reasonable argument to make that many mainstream media outlets were downplaying the amount of rioting and looting going on relative to peaceful protests.
Yet somehow it's now WrongThink to even discuss how media may be shaping perceptions through biased reporting?
And now NBC's news-vigilantism unit can tattle to Google and shame them (and advertisers on the Google ad network) into pulling ads because two websites had the audacity to question NBC's narrative?
A healthy society functions best when there are checks and balances on all sides but unfortunately there are some who are using the recent protests and BLM to push Orwellian control of culture and media that is frankly quite disturbing.
As an aside, what exactly is "far-Right"? I've never seen any non Leftist publication described as "Right" so I'm not sure what adding "far" does other than function as a smear on anything Right of the mainstream Left.
That's why people saying "the free market will sort things out" with regard to free speech are deluding themselves. I'm not willing to wait 50 years for the free market to sort itself out while the ideal of free speech is torn asunder by private corporations.
NBC's title says (emphasis mine), "Google bans website ZeroHedge from its ad platform over COMMENTS ON protest articles".
There seems to be a lot of confusion over the reason for the ban, with people discussing how the sites' articles themselves might or might not violate policy.
NBC makes it pretty clear that's not the reason when it says "over policy violations found in the comments section".
http://web.archive.org/web/20200616191520/https://www.nbcnew...
Original headline: Google bans two websites from its ad platform over protest articles.
Whether it's better or worse is a whole other topic. Right now the world seems to be struggling with the question of who should police online behavior and how. That includes questions about how much responsibility a site has for user-generated content.
That is absolutely a legitimate debate to be had. I'm not quite sure how I feel about Google setting the terms of that debate, however. Usual caveats about how Google is a "private" company apply, obviously, but it does seem like a problem when a tech company with a wholly different perspective on what's "allowable" online speech and conduct uses it's market power in ads to set the rules for others.
Maybe I'm being a little dense, but I've never really like the phrase "user-generated content". At least it's honest, I suppose, because it suggests that it's something that can be "monetized" (because it's "content"). I miss old paper newspapers, and "letters to the editor".
[1] https://twitter.com/Google_Comms/status/1272997425821540352?...
It is not a one random decision. It is a concerted effort to silence dissenting voices. I am not sure how anyone can cheer here.
It just encourages even worse polarization and further entrenchment. It does not lead anywhere good.
Chomsky said "Organize and create mass movements". Does that still work today? The mass movements created uproar which led to an impeachment trial of a said individual but nothing came out of it. How would one go about to dismantle and re-structure a world where states and private firms co-depend on each other? Sadly I am at loss.
If Google were to make this argument, that concern for the brand-safety of their advertisers, they are pulling the ability for these sites to show ads that would make sense and be somewhat defensible... but are they simply saying these sites can still show Google ads but they cannot make money from the ads while Google still does? THAT would be different.
It seems that in this case, and in many others, it's really the Leftist position that is "controversial" while the Rightist position is simply not popular among the Leftist elite.
The ones who dictate what is "controversial" or not are often just wielding that term as propaganda for whichever side they support.
How can something be compared to something that doesn't exist?
> Far more than half of America is against illegal immigration yet the AP, newsrooms across America, Universities, etc refuse to even use the term illegal immigration and recognize the problem for what it is, in spite of the majority of America's agreement on the seriousness of the problem.
Even people who would agree if asked that “illegal immigration” is a problem don't necessarily prefer the term “illegal immigration”, and very often don't agree with other people who agree with that question as to what the nature of the problem is.
After all, people who think that the main problem is the system that produces illegal status for people who should be allowed, or even encouraged, to immigrate and people who think that the system is perfect but for it's failure to actually exclude all the people to whom it denies legal status can both easily agree with the statement “illegal immigration is a problem”. It's a statement people can agree with with no agreement on substance.
Not in any way symmetric conservative statements opposing illegal immigration. It's true that there are quite a lot of left-of-center statements opposing aspects the current regime of immigration restrictions, which are roughly parallel to the conservative rhetoric against illegal immigrants, but those statements are opposing illegal immigration from a different angle than the right is, not promoting illegal immigration.
> No extremists on your side, huh?
There are plenty of extrmists on the left, some of which are pro-immigrant.
But the real extremists on this issue tend to be against even the existence of the concept of illegal immigration, while the less extreme group tends to favor reform of the immigration system to better align the supply of legal immigration slots with demand for them and thus reduce the impetus for illegal immigration, and making it easier and more effective to focus enforcement efforts on immigrants that are individually undesirable (dangerous criminals, etc.) rather than merely supernumerary due to the arbitrary alotment of slots.
In the non-virtual world, there is a publically elected state that makes those decisions. In the virtual world, those decisions are made by private companies that own that part of the virtual world. Ever since the creating of the virtual world, there has been an ongoing tug-of-war between the state and the corporations for this exact control of authority. Now that our virtual and non-virtual worlds are so intertwined with each other, the state is still trying to catch up to understand, contain and secure the virtual world but they are still at loss.