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Comment by CqtGLRGcukpy | Hacker News Reader

I have two guesses why Google does this:

1) Google wants the most money, so they don't care to let dodgy ads thru.

2) There are more ads going out then can be reviewed, so they would rather have people report them, then they automatically reject the report until enough people report it, then an actual person may review it.

As to why Google doesn't use AI to review them? Google would rather use the AI in a way that makes them more money, than review ads and if AI decides to take them down then that's less money for Google.

(To be clear: I don't work for Google in any way, these are just my guesses)

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> so they would rather have people report them

I have reported so many of those dodgy, scammy, sexualized ads on YouTube, that YouTube/Google has removed the option to report advertisements from my account.

They don't care as long as they're getting paid and there's no immediate liability for them.

The brooklinen ads are mortifying when I'm online in public

Use an adblocker?

That's what I do and why I don't even know what brooklinen is.

The web is becoming very hostile to ad blockers. I use a VPN and I've noticed more and more sites just being obnoxious with their popups and even just crashing the site completely in a loop (looking at you EuroNews)

It doesn't solve everything but the 'full' desktop version of the ublock origin plugin runs just fine in Android on Firefox. I can't even imagine using any other mobile browser now. I don't know what the situation is for iphone platform stuff these days.

and f.e. brave on ios

Try firefox, as chrome puts restrictions on what adblockers can do

If a site doesn’t let me see it with my ad blocking enabled, I just go elsewhere.

This Even skimming the web could take up 1000X the hours I have in a day, and I really should spend more time exercising, and reading books, and with friends and family, and volunteering, and ...

I suspect it's not a real crash you're seeing, but rather a deceptive anti-adblocking script that redirects to a page that fraudulently claims to be a crash.

abp in firefox doesn't really remove them. I've seen and reported multiple scummy popup-like looking ads like tfn and saw it again for weeks...

ABP as in adblock plus?

Don't use that. Use Ublock Origin.

Use ublock origin rather than ABP. ABP was dead the moment they sold out to "responsible" ads.

There may be gaps every now and then in block lists of ad blocking solutions, but besides that, you are using the wrong ad blocker. abp is not to be trusted to reliably block all ads it could. It has a different mission than uBlock Origin.

They sell bedsheets, with sort of a raunchy ad campaign. I had a adblocker but wound up uninstalling it when it became more of a hassle than it was worth.

I've been on the same crusade, reporting all the scam/fake-ai/misinformation ads as possible, when a couple weeks ago they changed how you report. The ad will still play through as you're reporting it, and once finished reporting it still remains and you may see it again after a few swipes (YTShorts). It feels like they did this so they could get the money before removing it.

The funny thing is it used to be that people warned you not to go to dodgy sites as they were full of ads that were trying to steal your money or online identity. It was mostly just scaremongering, but it never hurt to be careful.

Nowadays, Google will serve you those exact ads if you go to any major news outlet.

Google was serving the ads on the dodgy sites. Nothing changed.

I think section 230 immunity shielding from from any liability is also very motivating. Google was born into a world where companies had 10,000s of support personnel, today there are companies with over a million employees, they could easily human-review every single ad and they probably would if they weren't able to divert that cost into profits without consequence. AI makes it even easier and cheaper but... why bother?

Then there's the profits from scams, Meta is the only one with the stones to admit they like scam ads because they make up 10% of their revenue. I doubt it's a massive coincidence all the other big platforms are overrun with scams they do as little as possible to police.

Does section 230 shield them from ads they select for display? Ads are not randomly hosted by random people and if you visit a random page those people uploaded, you see them. Google selects the ads they want to show you on search results, before youtube videos, or on third party websites. There's no "we don't know what that might be" going on at all -- they are running sophisticated algorithms to optimize the impact of those ads. Is that still be covered under section 230?

It's being challenged in court (at least for Meta) but historically it has been upheld including for Google.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230#False_information

As someone who has worked for Google Ads, I should say that they do review ads with both AI and humans, and do spend quite a bit of money and energy on finding and stopping both bad-faith advertisers ("buy side", what we see) and bad-faith publishers ("sell side", more of a scam on the advertisers/google itself).

Is it enough? Probably not, based on this article. Are their policies strict enough? IMHO no way, considering Youtube left an ad up for "Ukranian women" in the early years of the war which wtf. But they certainly do try.

Like most businesses, the actual people involved are also well-intentioned, at least in the abstract; they wanted to make ads that sell products without annoying people. Obviously there's material conditions beneath and around all that, but we don't need to explain that part here ;)

Their competition isn't really raising the bar either.

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

Meta also including CSAM in their ads, computer generated in the US and real abuse materials in South Asia:

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-failed-to-catch-hundreds-of...

As someone who advertised with them, they do seem to have an AI reviewer, and it also has false positives that no number of appeals seem to resolve. So in these cases you want to pay them money for good ads, but you can't because AI says no.

Google gets paid to show the ads.

Adding friction to the process (on the advertiser side) means less money for Google: 1) due to the cost of implementing the checking, 2) because some legitimate advertisers will be falsely denied, 3) because the scam ads were still paying money.

Not adding the friction doesn't seem to come with any serious downside. One would expect that it would, e.g. due to publishers removing the most profitable properties from the ad network or governments legislating this out of existence, but that doesn't seem to happen.

So, given these incentives, the outcome is inevitable.

If Google had to pay a massive fine for every scam ad that gets through, or was liable for the damages the ads cause, etc. - or otherwise had a strong incentive - suddenly there would be enough resources to make sure every ad is reviewed, advertisers that push scam ads get fully banned on the first offense rather than being given second, third, and fourth chances, etc.

All the friction goes down to the publishers fighting malvertising.

> 2) There are more ads going out then can be reviewed

The "more than can be reviewed" might have been a logical conclusion in a purely human based workflow, even if you have the lowest cost per head click workers in like, an external contractor call centre type environment in Bangladesh.

As the author points out, the ordinary consumer class version of publicly available Gemini very accurately classifies the ad as malicious. I really doubt that there are THAT MANY unique new ads being submitted per day that they can't afford the compute to run them through a similar classifier.

How about I rephrase it.

More than can be reviewed for the time and money they’re willing to spend.

Even before AI, they absolutely could’ve done it.

Yes, and I've also seen the absolute shitflood of horrible ads. Every time I see somebody else's system that isn't running ublock origin or similar... They clearly are prioritizing the ad revenue over any actual "don't take a steaming dump on the Internet" ethical priorities.

this argument still adds nothing to discussion because companies clearly want to spend zero but earn everything, the only amount they are willing to spend is on lawyers working on shielding companies from any responsibility including obvious cases of negligence

I don’t think they want the most money. If they did, they’d have done this long ago. The trend we’re seeing is about them just struggling to meet their quarter over quarter and year over year numbers. It’s a short term driven change to strategy, they’re trying to fill the hole with something else (we all know what) before admitting it exists. If they said their golden goose was dying, the stock would crash.

> 1) Google wants the most money, so they don't care to let dodgy ads thru.

They have literally destroyed their own reputation, and all the reputations of legitimate products that might appear along these scams. Do you think anyone would want their car, smartphone, or tax software appear next to actual credit card scams?

TV has standards for decency, and factuality, and might ban entire categories of ads (financial services) altogether.

It's not like they'll run out of ads to show anyway. If they take this ad down, they'll just show a different one?

Ad slots are auctioned. Scams getting shown means scammers are bidding more for those same slots than legitimate advertisers.

I'm actually aware of that and know that you're right. At the same time, I can't help but think that the market response will be for someone else to bid up and capture the slot either way. And if Google would rather serve those ads than enforce their own policies, they could always just loosen the policy.

Someone should ask them: if Gemini can’t evaluate this at scale then why should I use it for my enterprise?

Since they're not liable for damages, they simply don't care enough to check the ads.

because that makes them even more money for equally nonexistent amount of liability, this is actual answer, unfortunately

using AI to review ads costs basically nothing for Google

I would say it's just because there's no incentive to do anything unless a huge media storm breaks out or something.

turning a blind eye to this stuff probably makes them good money

If they reject more ads they get less money.

1 and 2 I believe But also when you see what sort of information you can get from putting ads alone, even when people dont click, is quite amazing.

> There are more ads going out then can be reviewed, so they would rather have people report them, then they automatically reject the report until enough people report it, then an actual person may review it.

If only there was a technology which could automate this... But we all know, AI is only used on users, not customers - and users get the two line perl script "AI" which says "We have reviewed your claim and decided to ignore it".

In underregulated capitalism, the reason is very simple: because they get away with it. This is why they despise regulation; it enforces accountability. Want to advertise? Ensure the ads are legit. It doesn't work when you say 'we didn't know beforehand' when a significant percentage is scams. That is when you start to curate the content beforehand.

In any other normal market, the middleman would be held accountable. Big tech? Not so much. We seen the slap on the wrist regarding Microsoft at the start of the century/millennium. We can also witness the same with regards to the garbage coming from China, where China doesn't take responsibility. Learned from the best.

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