Frankly it's stuff like this that gives me pause about ever working at a company like Google. It's truly disgusting.
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!
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.
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.