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Comment by Dma54rhs | Hacker News Reader

Adsense is Google and Google is an American company, you have to be very careful about the words in use. Usually it means a massive blocklist of words, when finding them don't display the ads on that page.

Even bigger newspapers sometimes don't have ads on the more morbid type of news pages.

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I appreciate you're trying to help but this is infuriating.

That puritanical, prudish attitude has done so much damage already, we should stop accepting it as "Americans gonna American".

What we should accept is that platorms which are not designed to be neutral, won't be.

Is the problem that Google caries with it the puritan American culture, or that too many people which might not share that culture rely on Google?

I think that, in this specific case, this is pretty clear: If there's a culture that does not allow a dictionary to define rape, there's something wrong with this culture.

I'm certain most Americans agree with me here which makes me assume that this specific problem is not one of culture, but probably scale and an absence of responsiblity at Google.

The more general question is interesting though, because it could go several ways. For example:

You could argue that people should anticipate that the platforms they rely on are not under their control (and should maybe act on that).

Or one could argue that the platforms should anticipate the diversity of cultural standards they are catering to by easing their moral rigidity. (For example through a more diverse/decentral company structure, etc.)

Here in Europe, some approach a somewhat similar question with some form of data nationalism, for better or worse. It plays into the same realization that there is an unresolved cultural difference between global platforms and local standards and intends to politically support local initiatives, corporations, etc. That, I think, doesn't solve the problem, but shifts the level of granularity.

Great problem, many angles.

But that's not the case at all. The dictionary that defines rape is still up and still ranking in Google search results. There's just no advertising allowed on that page. And you could argue that Google is being overly-puritanical, but you could also argue that most of their advertisers don't want to be associated with such words, even in a neutral context.

I think this is two arguments. The first one goes along the lines of: Defunding isn't problematic since it is not literally the only way to earn money.

For me that's equivalent to the idea that deplatforming isn't problematic, because people can still publish elsewhere or, worst case, still talk to other people.

Key to both ideas is to reject the social significance of operational scale as well as the power dimension of gradual influence.

Practically there is quite a lot of power hidden in the leeway and the bigger a company gets the more problematic their influence is for society as a whole.

The second argument, I think, is that there is nothing problematic about content demonetization because we always can trivially construct a plausible advertising interest against any unfashionable content, hence it's not primarily seen as a chilling effect but something innocent that just, by accident, ends up continuously narrowing the conversation towards the presentable and trivial.

I think this argument isn't great. Just because there's innocent intentions at play it does neither show that there are only innocent intentions at play nor that the overall venture does not, in the end, have bad consequences for society.

If our ad-ecosystem would allow advertisers to nudge a TV station towards what news they show, it would be a bad ecosystem for society, even if it's understandable that someone does not want to show their brand next to real talk.

I'll go along with you that defunding is a form of ipso facto deplatforming and therefore bad. I think it's trumped in this case by the advertisers rights to free association (and Google's desire to attract advertisers). But if (and I think this is your real objection) that defunding/deplatforming was aimed at a protected class or political identity, then that concern would rule.

That's not the case here, however. And I don't think we should be so concerned about a slippery slope that we can't allow any discrimination on the part of advertisers or Google.

By the way, I think I sense an undercurrent of "but that's just stupid" in regards to the objection to the extremely neutral use of dictionary definitions. You haven't made that argument explicitly, but for what it's worth, I'd agree with you on that personally. But that's not my call to make, or yours. (And if I'm imagining that undercurrent, then my apologies.)

Going from OP's story, his whole website was blacklisted from using Google Ads.

I get you have pages for those words since you are running a dictionary, but do I understand you were running ads for pages with those words specific?

Why should it matter? It’s a dictionary, words are in it. What will they find objectionable is utterly random and should not be a factor... what people find objectionable enough to hardcode exceptions for can be rather idiosyncratic https://twitter.com/techdrgn/status/1359221506165805060?s=21 for example.

More importantly, the issue is that there’s no recourse in these cases. It’s downright stupid that you can report a dictionary for this and get them permanently banned. If the issue is don’t run ads on naught word pages then google should make this list public and stop ruining businesses by practicing “I’ll know it when I see it” style moderation by algorithmic bots without human oversight.

If you are trying to sell a dictionary I see no reason why a company should allow you to advertise on the word "rape" to do so.

That's like saying Oxford Dictionary shouldn't be able to make money off their dictionary because it contains the word rape.

It's a damn definition, not an article or essay on rape. Facts shouldn't be censored because someone feels it might offend their delicate senses.

I don't mean that.

I mean it's fine to have those pages. Google also ranks them for those keywords.

But I can understand why a company won't allow someone to specifically run ads on those keywords. Like the above comment about ebay talks about.

I'm not sure whether that happened in this case or not, but that was my question

15 or so years ago, eBay appeared to be buying adverts for all noun searches on Google. Certainly when I searched for “plutonium” and “antimatter” and a few other ridiculous keywords, I saw ads telling me I could “buy it cheap on eBay”. I tried this experiment in response to news stories criticising eBay for the same with the nouns “women” and “slaves”.

Did you think they were actually selling plutonium?

This is the same problem in a different skin: words to not equal intent. When we only judge by words we restrict good faith information and promote bad faith euphimisms that do real harm.

I would guess they didn't put different adds on different words, so, those words had the exact same adds as every other word.

I think Google's problem is that they aren't moral enough. They have no dedication to an ideal of actually caring about people or empathy, or any number of other things. They are greedy, mechanistic, and arrogant. Moral people aren't like that. They don't even uphold American values of liberty, free market, or freedom of speech. If they _were_ moral, a lot of those things would be solved.

This is very dystopian. Don’t say the bad word, the machines are listening.

It's not the machines, it's the advertisers. If you're paying for publicity, you don't want it next to things anyone might find unsavoury. You don't want your products to be associated with X.

In that case the ad networks themselves should provide tools that automatically detect forbidden words and disable ads, instead of arbitrarily enforcing their policy on random small players.

Associated with words defined in a dictionary? How pedantic do you have to be to say "I don't want to advertise with Britannica because their dictionary has the word rape"?

I think it’s more that you don’t want your ad to show up on a page about rape, but you’re fine with it showing up on a page about joy. Coca-Cola works hard to associate their brand with happy experiences. They’d probably take out ads on the positive words in a dictionary but not the negative ones. If this site was making no distinction, it would lose Coca-Cola as a sponsor. Not really defending Google, but the puritanical explanation isn’t the best one.

I mean in some aspect I agree in spirit with your point but your point is off topic.

It may be questionable to have your stuff advertised on a page about the history of Germany...

But lets be honest... that's not why these things are being taken down. They aren't being removed because advertisers are complaining. Please show me where anything of that sort is mentioned - either in the OP of this thread or specifically in the article about "buckle-less belts"...

In the example of this thread... they are being removed because someone (presumably a competitor) reported their app for SUPPORTING "rape and pedos". A dictionary with a definition of rape getting removed for "supporting" rape by defining it - while competing dictionaries aren't removed for also defining the same words? Why aren't they getting removed for having a definition of rape that advertisers don't want to be listed on?

Please... show me where I'm wrong that the dictionary application was removed for 'advertiser complaints'... or the original article has its stuff removed for advertisers complaining.

I'm sure you're right, but that means that ad money is valued above everything else. That's kinda dystopian.

In the long run, it has to make ad financed content less viable. We'll end up with advertiser friendly content, with no consumers.

There are completely legitimate reasons which still cause trouble [0] like description of Broadcast TV episodes with (gasp) murders and killers..

Why am I seeing the words "Hugging" and "Cuddled" in summaries? The TV Calendar is monetised using Google Adsense. As part of Googles drive to be more advertiser friendly (you may know this as the Adpocalyse - it didn't just affect Youtubers) their system is now telling me the Calendar has SHOCKING CONTENT on it, and that ads will be removed from such pages.

[0] https://www.pogdesign.co.uk/cat/frequently-asked-questions.p...

Isn't it obvious that the same people who are actually looking for a translation of some word would not have any issue* seeing that some word in an ad?

* - at least not bigger issue than seeing any ads at all, but those would run ad-blocker anyway.

I disagree that his given example is dystopian.

He is specifically taking about pages with Ads on them. Corporations don't want to be associated with said terms, so they wouldn't want to be advertised in that context.

No, you're missing the point completely. His competitors were using the same data source. The problem here is not ads appearing next to "bad" words, or what and who gets to decide what "bad" words even are, that's a whole other discussion.

The issue here is that Google, Amazon or $bigcorp allows its "blocking" algorithm to be misused, to be weaponized by competitors and that it allows no possibility of human review, that you can't get any human via phone or email to review a completely arbitrary (and often enough plain wrong) decision a random algo has committed (through human instigation or on its own rampage, as it happens often enough). That nobody has to account for and take responsibility for algorithmic decisions ("Sorry, computer says no. Good bye).

I have become so frustrated with this issue (we seem to discuss it every other day on HN) that I've come to think that you should not be allowed to offer services using automation without a clear and working process of escalation to a human in case of trouble. If we allow this behavior to continue and to spread (and look, I get it, doing business this way is very attractive and scales beautifully), things will only get worse.

We'll get to the point where it's "sorry, your car was deactivated because $passenger reported that you used a bad word in his presence. Do not contact us again". Maybe this will wake people up and show them that this way of offering services is broken.

Or "sorry, our algorithm decided you get the death penalty based on 100 reports of people that you did $badthing. chops head off Sorry, don't contact us again." Too much hyperbole? We'll see. Algorithmic determination of prison sentences already exists.

You're addressing the example of the opener, not the given example that was called dystopian. So if anyone is missing the point, it's you.

we only know what the opener said about his story, so i dont feel comfortable saying wherever what happened to him was dystopian or not.

This doesn't explain the fact it was only applied to one business. If it was a simple keyword matcher banning sites that use words on the naughty list then at least it would be fair and equitable stupidity. Google applying it seemingly at random so whether or not you can make an ad-driven living is mostly down to luck makes it much worse.

And this is a passed down requirement, coming from the major advertisers. Google is simply enacting their will to never advertise on anything remotely related to a laundry list of taboos. I have a vague memory of something about this being in ToS (which I read ages ago, before joining the company) and I think we got smarter about this (preventing display on particular content; think like demonetising particular videos on YT).

Source: I work in Google. Not in Ads, but this topic has been discussed in TGIF at some point.

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