Partially off topic, but youtube ads for me are currently 70% out and out scams - deepfaked tv personalities telling you about some government scheme where every person gets £20,000 cash.
Even the closed ecosystems are infected.
Even the closed ecosystems are infected.
In publishing, I’d consider something like The Economist or NTY to be a “closed ecosystem”. Many of those places (like CNBC, Fox, WaPo, etc) have auto generated spam articles every day whether it’s a company's earnings or a press release regurgitation. Sometimes that garbage can be accidentally harmful. At least we’re not at the point that CNBC push crypto miners in their blogs. We’re not far off though
"it's better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission (and keep the money either way)" is probably up on the wall instead of "do no evil"
AFAIK, Section 230 protection extends to online advertisement as these companies claim the ads are user generated content. There were many law suits against Google and Meta about being responsible for the content and ads their algorithms push and how it radicalized people or harmed people. I recall Google and Meta won all those cases.
Plus, in the 1960s there was a famous Supreme Court case against NYT for publishing a pro-civil rights ads that contained wrong claims against some like cop or politician in the south. They argues that NYT was libel for the malicious attack. The Supreme Court ruled in NYT favor because even if the ad buyers were malicious, they need to prove that NYT was also intentionally malicious in their intent
Google's revenue is largely from promoting scams and tricking old people into clicking ads that look like normal search results. They're a total scumbag company, it's a sign of how broken consumer protection is that they've gotten away with it for years with no meaningful legal consequences.
[EDIT] Downvotes are warranted, I missed the large part of their revenue that comes from extorting companies into paying for ads for their own brand name so competitors and scams don't top searches for them.
Bing is 10 times worse. They intermix search results with ads, and the only indication is a small light-gray/white “WEB” or “AD” tag that has a css blur and pixilation effect. It’s so subtle it’s insane.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2020/1/23/21078343/google-ad-d...
A few years back when people were talking about Q-Anon / Pedophile celebrities thousands of YouTube channels were taken down simultaneously of anyone, ANYONE, who was talking about it. "Mouthy Buddha" on YouTube had just 2 videos on the subject and had his channel taken down and was never allowed back on. They all migrated over to BitChute at the time. The YouTube press release claimed about 10,000 videos and their channels removed.
So Google does have ways of scanning content and banning the scam ads, they just don't want to.