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Comment by rangerelf | Hacker News Reader

I think you're giving them an unnecessary pass, the incentives are completely in their favor: don't screen ads, make money off ads that are frauds, scams, age-inappropriate, etc... wait for "someone" to report those ads as such; meanwhile, keep making money off them, and the scammers/frauds/etc keep making marks.

The human-friendly way would be to screen ads before airing them, which means hiring teams to do the screening; have an appropriate legal language in the ad screening section saying that ads may be rejected for "Reasons" which will be explained in the rejection note, and the rejection can be appealed upon which another person will deal with the rejection review process.

It's not a difficult problem, but it gets in the way of making money hand over fist.

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I think I probably am giving them an unnecessary pass. There is another case in the below links about FB ads where Facebook banned an advertiser's account because of usage of words "panda" and "python".

While that case is unrelated, if someone prescreens the ads without having the required context, (let's be real here, it would be reviewed by someone in Philippines or India, not USA) they are likely to block stuff they do not understand but told to err on the side of the caution - which is what you presumably want to avoid the cases as in this title.

> the rejection can be appealed upon which another person will deal with the rejection review process

It still requires someone to have context about what you are running an advert on. Still hard to find, still not as reliable, and would either end up blocking many legit ads, or passing some objectionable ads. It does not just hurt their bottomline, but the bottomline of every good faith advertiser on the network.

I agree that just reporting post seeing the ad is a poor feedback mechanism. Maybe some sort of AI. They do verify advertisers though as they say. Maybe that should be more stringent.

I don't see a problem with banning legitimate ads.

Please keep in mind that ads are messages that visitors never subscribed for. The only party that loses here is the advertiser, and I couldn't care less. In fact, the problem with advertising is that the customers are the advertisers, ads networks being biased to act in their favor, visitors being just the resources being sold.

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