Before watching this video of a journalist who was kidnapped and possibly tortured to give you this false statement, here’s an ad about liberty mutual life insurance. Liberty!
To get us another deal
Sometimes it's a bit evil
Sometimes just a bit shady
And don't you ever worry
If we cancel anything it will be Hangsout, Play Music, Timely and Poly
I can't even imagine how a hypothetical well-intentioned judge who wanted to apply that provision correctly would proceed. The judge would basically have to choose between imposing their own personal view on good and evil or declaring the provision nonjusticiable.
Maybe the license could include a mandatory arbitration clause with an arbitrator who shares the author's values, but that still sounds like a terrible idea.
I went in assuming someone's in charge, but honestly, most of the mistakes Google makes are in the category "nobody's in charge." They operate at a scale where everyone tries to use them to do everything. That's everything good and everything bad. They've been both a force for normalizing LGBTQ identity and a force against it, a mass communication tool and a mass oppression tool, a platform to help people and a platform to stalk people. They actively manage, observe, maintain, and regulate only a subset of the space of uses their tools allow.
This is explanation, not excuse. I'm not there anymore because I think it should be their responsibility to take responsibility reflective of their size and impact. I lost faith that the leadership agreed.
In this specific example, my assumption from personal priors is they let this ad in because there's nobody in charge of negative-filtering ads like this until complaints come, and in the absence of policy the default policy is "allow." They have categories to catch ads for illegal substances, various forms of illegal activity, and so on, but "A state-level actor will use our ad platform to paint a false message of the status of a political prisoner" is a new one for them.
Alphabet is still majority-owned by the founders as of 2019. In practice, the board is advisory; 100% of stockholders who's names aren't "Larry Page" and "Sergey Brin" could vote the same on an issue, and the issue will carry in whatever direction Larry and Sergey say it should if both agree.
I fully agree with you, and I don't think that there's any going back: the founders don't care about this, a CEO generally only takes a principled stand on things like this when it's their baby, but Google is not Sundar's baby.
At 11:30-12:20, he taught a course on advertising. At 12:30-13:20, he taught a course on business ethics. Every time a student asked a question, he had to stop and remember which course he was teaching before he answered!
I don't know how much Google is profiting from the Belarusian government, but unless it's a lot, I doubt Google would actively try keeping these ads. If it is a lot of money, that's indeed a data point which supports the theory that they're acting out of greed.
The above of course doesn't excuse Google's mismanagement of the situation, but doing something bad out of incompetence is a different kind of failure (with different remedies necessary) than doing the same out of greed.
I'm saying that most of them — including those who can do something about it — are probably not aware that this ad got through their approval system. If you think this is not the case, you underestimate how inefficiently information travels in large organisations.
As for how much they're profiting off of it? Probably not much from just the Belarusian government, but they don't just have morally awful ads by Belarus, they have morally awful ads coming from probably thousands of advertisers. This one is just exceptionally disgusting. But I doubt an actual human was even involved in the responses about this ad.
That's right! There are plenty of other continents with dictators to give into!
Whether it's malicious or not, Google created this ecosystem where you need to process and serve a bazillion ads to compete with them, if they're unable to properly vet those ads it's on them to scale back to a size where they can properly vet them.
If this was a one-off issue then sure - but Google runs a lot of really slimy advertisements.
It's pretty telling that even small-ish video producers are willing to vet their advertising partners more thoroughly.
That's always been the case and it still doesn't matter. It would matter if this was an isolated thing that happened every once in a while, but the outcome has been the same, which makes it not matter when it's been going on for so long.
Hate to break it to you, but that is how most evil in the world works-- through callous indifference and incompetence, not through some cartoon villain.
But why are you not quitting. I am sure you can find another job within a week. Curious what you choose to stay.
This is the kind of reactionary attitude that causes YouTube to tune its moderation algorithms to be overly err on the side of demonetizing. Later, even more people will complain that their favorite YouTuber is being demonetized. Everyone has their own brilliant ideas of perfect moderation, but at the end of the day, they would never be willing to accept that responsibility themselves and the blowback that comes with it. See the grandstanding that occured during the section 230 Congressional hearings as a perfect example.
Why can't YouTube simply just make a mistake and correct for it? When governments failed to protect a plane from being forcibly escorted, I don't see why people expect a private business to fix all the world's geopolitical issues.
So youtube can do this but if they did it, the very same people who claim to want this would lose their collective minds. They don't realize they're baddies too on some level, and want only their own kind of baddies to have free reign in the media.
Great point about the governments too! Youtube can't fix what trillions in collective worldwide military spending can't fix. If dictators are this brazen and getting away wit this, as well as the American dictator wanna-be getting away with 1/6, sorry but FAANG can't help you. We're too fargone for tech solutions at this point. Fix your governments first.
It matters that they are falling short and only correct their mistakes when massive social pressure is applied because most issues can't generate the social pressure needed to get Google to notice. That means most of their errors won't actually get fixed.
Google makes insane amounts of profits, but they don't have the resources to moderate content well?
Yeah but this video is of a political prisoner who was tortured and the account is a government account.
The youtubers getting improperly demonetized are often minorities with content that could be offensive to some group of people (eg. gay youtubers talking about their life... is offensive to extremely religious people).
There is a big moderation quality gap between "official government posts torture prisoners" and "random gay 21yo in LA describes college life". I DO expect youtube to be able to get this balance at least right, all of the time.
YT must deal with probably hundreds of new ads a day. They stand to gain nearly nothing from running this particular ad, and stand to lose quite a lot, even from a pure corporate-self-interest perspective. Which is more likely: that YT said "screw human rights abuses, gimme the cash" in full knowledge of what was going on, or that some contractor who had already reviewed a dozen that day and maybe hasn't even seen the news articles clicked a button without proper due diligence, and YT hadn't factored "what if a developed nation's government openly advertises human rights abuses" into its oversight processes?
Although I'm sure these aren't the reasons YouTube approved the ad(s).