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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

In what way are these situations comparable?

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.

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> In what way are these situations comparable?

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.

> the info is probably something I’m interested in

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.

> 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.

It would be all totally fine if the pro-life totally not abortion clinics didn’t masquerade as abortion clinics. There is no problem with presenting people with option, but there is a problem with misrepresenting what the options are.

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 situation is more similar to Googling "nearest emergency room" and getting results for Christian Science Churches, where they don't believe that physical maladies are real.

The point is that Google is effectively denying medical care.

Like searching for how to commit suicide and the top results being about dissuading you from it?

The analogy would work if suicide was legal and desirable and there were reputable suicide services a la Futurama.

There are 20 countries in the world where suicide is considered illegal, which is a weird concept on its own. Here’s the map: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_legislation.

Now, if we talked about assisted suicide…

> Marijuana

Illegal, straight to jail, and morally bad

> Assisted Marijuana

Totally legal and morally good

I know you're being sarcastic, but medical marijuana in various US States has basically been this.

> Illegal, straight to jail, and morally bad

It depends on where you are: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_cannabis

>> comparing weed to suicide

You okay there, bud?

1. When you say "desirable" here you're speaking relatively. Abortion isn't intrinsically something that the vast majority of women want, what they want is to not be pregnant for one reason or another.

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.

Go to r/RegretfulParents and read about some of the stories of women who wanted abortions and were manipulated by these places at a vulnerable time in their life. It’s pretty horrifying.

Most of these places won’t help a lick once the baby is actually born.

Yes. It's a pro-birth movement, not life. Life lasts a long time and that's expensive and "something she should have thought about before having kids" or some such gymnastics. These same folks will gladly spit on a child because their parents are poor or talk about it like it's some kind of lesson they deserve.

Well I can't speak for these places since I've never worked for them or used them, but that being said, giving up a child for adoption is very, very easy. Even fire halls take children, no questions asked.

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.

1. You think adoption is the answer? Well, how many children have you adopted?

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.

No because suicide and abortion are not comparable.

There are all sorts of ways you can compare them. For example, you just compared them.

Another: “they are both controversial topics”.

Any attempt to invoke suicide in a discussion about abortion is pure whataboutism, as this thread is aptly demonstrating.

Notably, Kagi considered but declined to implement this functionality, out of principle (basically the very principle we're debating right here).

https://kagifeedback.org/d/865-suicide-results-should-probab...

("Suicide results should probably have a "don't do that" widget like google")

GP "got it in one." This is SEO 101. Just because you don't like how it worked out doesn't mean the system broke. It's working exactly as designed.

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.

Nope.

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.

What do you mean "nope?" You're implying that PageRank makes MORAL judgements about the content, and you know it doesn't. It CAN'T. All it can know are metrics like incoming links and traffic. You're using "value judgement" here in a completely wrong way. Your definition of "value" and Google's are very different. And, honestly, I'm flummoxed why this is so confusing.

You're the one injecting morals into the debate. At no point am I making a moral argument.

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.

Honest to God, I don't think I've ever been so confused by a conversation on the internet in 30 years.

I don't know how I could any clearer than "Google has an interest in providing relevant results to users". If you're still not getting it then you might need to look inwards.

And I have absolutely no idea how Google is supposed to do that in this context without making a human decision, based on morals, and then you accuse me of injecting morality into the discussion. How can you not see how confusing this is?

I'm looking inside, and I just see that you're talking out of both sides of your mouth.

I do not understand why you keep going back to morals here. Google's ad policy is very, very clear:

> 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.

And I can't understand how you keep trying to say that this doesn't involve morals. FTFA, only 38% of these "centers" do not provide any sort of abortion services at all. Fine. Throw them out. But what about the other 60%? They apparently do perform abortions. Do they just get a pass at that point?

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.

> FTFA, only 38% of these "centers" do not provide any sort of abortion services at all. Fine. Throw them out.

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.

I want to think that people who google abortion providers don't want their babies killed, they simply need help, one way or another

Fetuses, not babies. Let’s be accurate here.

The difference is immaterial in the third trimester[1] when it becomes viable and the only difference is whether it's outside or inside.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetus#/media/File:Prenatal_dev...

And that's complete goalpost shifting.

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.

That’s great because nobody who is having an abortion is killing babies! :)

Fair. It’s valid to present options. The problem here is not that pro life orgs show up as ads in abortion searches.

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?

>If you google GitHub you’re probably looking for source control.

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.

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