If you google GitHub you’re probably looking for source control. GitLab offers source control.
If you google “abortion providers” you’re looking to get an abortion. The ads you see are specifically for people who want to look like abortion providers but actually seek to stop you from getting one and don’t provide any abortion services at all.
It’s like googling GitHub and the top result being a religious group that considers source control to be an abomination, disguising themselves until you’ve paid for an account when they can inundate you with propaganda.
People searching for GitHub are more likely to use git and therefore are gitlab’s target audience.
People searching for abortions are more likely to get an abortion and thus the target audience for anti-abortion orgs.
It seems logical from an advertising perspective even though you may not agree with it.
As a pregnant woman deciding what I do with my pregnancy, this isn’t even a bad ad as the info is probably something I’m interested in. Sometimes I know exactly what I want. Sometimes I’m researching options.
So if you were a pregnant woman you’d agree that these ads are bad because they deliberately misrepresent themselves. If you’re researching what to do with your pregnancy you’d surely want your search results to be accurate?
> As a pregnant woman deciding what I do with my pregnancy
For what it’s worth I’m pretty sure someone googling “abortion center near me” has decided what to do with their pregnancy anyway.
I think it’s hard to speak for everyone in such a way and everyone is different. Personally, I’ve googled this exact thing and hadn’t made up my mind yet.
This is a hard problem to google to solve, but they do make one off exceptions for banned types of ad buys. Off the top of my head, they voluntarily add restrictions for who can advertise for drug names. Not sure how they decide, but I suppose some abortion rights advocacy group could write a letter asking google to limit who can advertise related to abortion.
Although I could see this being a Supreme Court case if the anti-abortion folks are willing to pursue.
The screenshots in the article show pro-life clinic that is advertising itself as “abortion pill”. Google literally had to implement the “provides abortions” and “does not provide abortions” tags because the results are otherwise indistinguishable.
I totally respect people’s right to choose.I can understand the stance that life is precious. I am not against the ads for pro life clinics, because pregnancy can be scary and it can be a way to find some resources and support.
However it doesn’t feel right that pro life clinics try to trick you into it.
The point is that Google is effectively denying medical care.
2. Many, many people have middle-of-the-road opinions about abortion. Nudging them into carrying the human to term and giving it up for adoption isn't akin to selling fake services, it's more akin to organ donation.
Most of these places won’t help a lick once the baby is actually born.
I understand that there are regretful parents, but keep in mind these things:
1. These very parents were given the gift of making it to adulthood to make a choice they regret, something that unborn children do not get to make.
2. Adults regret many things and the choice for carrying a baby to term while adoption is such a viable option is far from the top of the list of things that someone regrets in life. It is much more likely for someone to regret getting married than for them to regret giving birth.
3. Ethics truly do matter. It is not what someone does when the manager of the bank is standing over them and they check their balance with their debit card that matters. It is what they do when the ATM erroneously displays a much higher balance in the middle of the night in a dark and seedy bar that counts. In the same way, resisting the dehumanizing characterization of unborn humans matters most in societies where this is common place enough for these decisions to carry weight, and there are many example from history that highlight the same type of moral dilemmas. It seems strange standing in the present and being confronted with a challenge that we may very well be "the bad guys" but the same was true of slavers and many other horrible types of people.
2. In the US, there are currently 60,000 children 2-years or younger in foster care. Based on that, I’d say putting a child up for adoption isn’t all that easy.
3. There are many reasons a person does not want to carry a fetus to term. Maybe they are a rape or incest victim? Maybe they don’t want to their body to permanently changed by pregnancy? Maybe they don’t want to risk death during childbirth? Or maybe maybe it’s none of our fucking business why they want to have an abortion.
Now, if we talked about assisted suicide…
Illegal, straight to jail, and morally bad
> Assisted Marijuana
Totally legal and morally good
You okay there, bud?
It depends on where you are: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cannabis
Another: “they are both controversial topics”.
https://kagifeedback.org/d/865-suicide-results-should-probab...
("Suicide results should probably have a "don't do that" widget like google")
More and more of us hate it, for ALL the reasons that it doesn't take us to exactly what WE think it ought to show us. Like having several ads at the top, and then the next several links leading us to YouTube videos asking us to "like and subscribe" for more source control "content."
This entire thread is now devoted to how much censorship, ethics, and literal mind reading we need to program AI with to make it work in our new, evolved, and COMPLETELY overly-sensitized society.
If these anti-abortion ads were honest about what they are I’d agree with you. But they aren’t, they’re deliberately portraying themselves as something they are not in order to ensnare their target market.
Google makes value judgements about search results all the time. PageRank has always been a value judgement. Spam filtering is a value judgment. Any result, ad or not, portraying itself as something other than what it is? That’s a bad search result and Google would be a better search engine if it didn’t have them.
I'm saying that PageRank is just one of many value judgements Google makes. Google is not impartial. Not all incoming links are equal, Google makes a value judgement about which domains are more valuable than others. Google also makes value judgements about what is and isn't spam, which includes results that try to game the system by appearing to be something they are not. This is the latter. These are anti-abortion activists attempting to look like abortion centers, something they are not.
If it helps you remove the moral angle here: let's say I place an ad against the search term "cars for sale" with an ad saying "great value cars available to buy here!" and when you click you end up on a page that sells bikes. Is that a good search result? No, it is not. Is that likely to satisfy a user searching for a car? No, it is not. By the rules Google themselves outline they would remove my ad:
> We don’t allow ads or destinations that deceive users by excluding relevant product information or providing misleading information about products, services, or businesses.
https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6020955?hl=en
You're so focused on trying to push a contrarian view that you're losing sight of the fact that Google is a business, and it serves their business interests to give users relevant results.
I'm looking inside, and I just see that you're talking out of both sides of your mouth.
> We don’t allow ads or destinations that deceive users by excluding relevant product information or providing misleading information about products, services, or businesses.
These anti-abortion activist ads provide misleading information about the products and/or services they provide. No moral judgement required: they are misleading ads.
What if they do so only in the cases of "the life of the mother," and try to talk people out of it in every other circumstance? Do they still qualify to win auctions on those keywords? The article itself makes it very clear that this whole decision tree is problematic and requires human pruning. Once you start down this road of vetting whether a clinic is offering abortions or not, there's going to be a bunch of grey-area cases that need to be decided, and those decisions are implicitly moral in the general case.
The nature of the search question itself is moral to start out with. Should "abortions near me" return results including "crisis centers" -- if it's really a "health care" or "pro-choice" question -- or is that search really code for "where can I get a DNC for the least money and hassle?" There are morals involved in every part of this topic.
That's literally the point I've been making the entire time. I can't believe it took us this long to get here.
I'm off to do something more productive with my day, later.
It is quite a bit shit that pro life organizations advertise themselves as abortion clinics. You can see it in the screenshot in the article, the ad is talking about abortion pill, no mention of pro life whatsoever. It is literally indistinguishable from actual abortion clinics, and it is by design.
Why do we need to trick women into it? Why do you have to wait weeks for your appointment with a fake abortion clinic only to find out hours into your appointment that they will actually not provide an abortion?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetus#/media/File:Prenatal_dev...
Third trimester abortions are extremely rare (less than 1%) and are overwhelmingly performed for medical reasons, not because of personal choice. There aren't tons of women carrying babies around in their bodies for six months then spontaneously deciding they don't want it after all, it's always been a disingenuous talking point.
If I google Github I'm looking for github.com because I don't remember the URL or I don't know what an address bar is.
And what is more, we have an ethical obligations as Google's users and customers to force Google to behave ethically, since massive international corporations never will do so on their own.
Your twisted words here aren't helping your argument. In this situation someone is looking for healthcare options and they are being shown options for scam services that have no intention to ever provide any healthcare.
Just as if someone was searching for prescription medication and it directed them to sites that sold what appeared to be medication and instead were just sugar pills made to look like real medication.
Same concept. Same form of deceit.
Yes, but not for teens googling "abortion care." Are you arguing in good faith here?
Are you arguing that clinics don't provide services that help women deliver babies or guide them through adoption? That's ridiculous. My two children are proof that doctors aren't going around fighting against women giving birth.
The main point is false representation; which Google if they value their relationship with their users .. they do have an obligation to carry advertising towards some degree of truth in representation of product or service being offered.
Well yes, because you're supposed to steer people away from killing, not towards it. After all, it's a good thing for searches about suicide to return results about treating depression, but it'd be horrible if searches about treating depression returned results about how to commit suicide.
> The main point is false representation; which Google if they value their relationship with their users .. they do have an obligation to carry advertising towards some degree of truth in representation of product or service being offered.
Continuing with my above example, is it false representation for Google to give you anti-suicide results for searches about suicide? Should they have to be truthful by only giving you results with instructions?
Your writing the words down does not make it so. It isn't particularly complex, and it isn't particularly controversial in the United States, even among Republicans; people want abortion rights and fringe groups want to deprive them of it.
Edit: also, I can't believe you baited me into arguing about whether abortion should be allowed or not. Just in case you aren't actually familiar with these "crisis pregnancy centers" and how they work, this is about physical buildings that literally masquerade as abortion centers who are ready to help people get their needed abortions, and instead string them along until it's legally or medically too late.
Of course people who believe abortion is problematic should be allowed to freely say so. That is not the activity that these frauds are engaged in.
I’d hardly call extremist right-wing Christians a ‘fringe group’, as much as I think most people wish they were...
‘Terrorist group’? Sure. Spot on. ‘Fringe’? Sadly not at all.
Look at the ongoing trans genocide as another example as to how big and how powerful these truly hate-filled people are.
EDIT: saw a disgusting uneducated dead comment below here saying it’s offensive to call the very real trans genocide a ‘genocide’ to others because I guess they’ve either done no research or are more likely just transphobic.
It’s sad to see even in usually amazing communities like this; that the denial of the trans genocide continues.
We can’t begin to fix a problem, before we acknowledge the problem exists, and this isn’t a deniable or debatable issue - it’s happening. Let’s not be ignorant hateful cretins by denying it. Please.
"Ethical" and "moral" are often used interchangeably because they mostly mean the same thing. Have you ever stopped to consider that your moral code may be wrong, that what you consider "good" is actually evil and vice versa?
From: https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/N86GqF7e5kx7diHpiRng/ful...
"Compared to women who deliver, those who miscarry or have TOP face significantly elevated rates of psychiatric disorders, substance use, suicidal behaviors, sleep disorders, post-traumatic stress disorders, a decline in general health, and elevated rates of recourse to medical treatments in general, most of which have been observed within the first through ten years following the pregnancy loss."
And from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30397472/:
"Among a sample of women seeking counseling for post-abortion distress, 64% felt “forced by outside circumstance” to have an abortion and 83% indicated they would have carried to term if significant others in their lives had encouraged delivery"
And, from https://afterabortion.org/all-abortion-risks-must-be-disclos...
Planned Parenthood tried arguing in court that they shouldn't have to disclose the statistically significant risk of increased suicide to women seeking an abortion, or any of the other risks. It's almost like they have their own agenda that goes against what is best for their patients. It's also almost like what they are doing isn't really health care!
And all of this isn't even taking into account the moral and ethical claim that the unborn child has the human right to life. Do not be so confident that your sense of morality and ethics is correct, and that therefore one of the most powerful information companies in the world should direct its resources towards your chosen ideology or religion. Free spech doesn't exist so bad people can say evil things; it exists because what is good and what is bad is hard enough to figure out that everyone needs to be able to speak their mind and discuss the issues at hand so that we can reach the best consensus.