You don't have to be working for FAANG. There are literally thousands of companies that do not require you to serve brutal European dictators as your daily job. Yes, the salary would be just "good beyond the dreams of any average American" instead of "obscenely and ridiculously high, I mean who even gets this kind of money?!" - but it's possible to survive in America on low-to-middle six figures, surprisingly.
I'm not trying to defend Google here but could it be the case that they're simply not aware of the issue, or rather the issue didn't reach the appropriate people within the organisation who can get these ads removed?
I don't know how much Google is profiting from the Belarusian government, but unless it's a lot, I doubt Google would actively try keeping these ads. If it is a lot of money, that's indeed a data point which supports the theory that they're acting out of greed.
The above of course doesn't excuse Google's mismanagement of the situation, but doing something bad out of incompetence is a different kind of failure (with different remedies necessary) than doing the same out of greed.
They ban literally hundreds of thousands of videos for all kinds of sins, from all kinds of people - from US Congressmen to Bob Dylan. But the hostage video made as a result of the most prominent event that happened in Europe, where the last European dictator has hijacked a foreign plane to snatch a dissident - they just never heard anything about it, and nobody can find anybody to contact about it. Yea right, totally believable.
I'm not saying that YouTube employees are not aware of the kidnapping, most of them probably are.
I'm saying that most of them — including those who can do something about it — are probably not aware that this ad got through their approval system. If you think this is not the case, you underestimate how inefficiently information travels in large organisations.
I think their filtering system by now is powerful enough to catch anything they want. And it's not some anonymous account as I understand that uploaded it in the dark hour of the night under the guise of unpacking video - they knew who the canal belongs to, and they took money from them. They knew, or they should have known and willfully ignored it - which bears the same responsibility.
They're probably not aware of it, but this isn't an isolated case. Google clearly is not aware of a ton of problematic stuff in the ecosystem they've created. That's the problem here.
As for how much they're profiting off of it? Probably not much from just the Belarusian government, but they don't just have morally awful ads by Belarus, they have morally awful ads coming from probably thousands of advertisers. This one is just exceptionally disgusting. But I doubt an actual human was even involved in the responses about this ad.
I think the usual argument is more along the lines of: Google's greed prevents them from putting the proper controls in place to prevent these sorts of abuses of the system, because those controls would cost too much. Not so much that any particular specific instance of abuse is particularly profitable.
The problem is that groups have been raising it for a year (mentioned in the article). Google have structures / policies in place to avoid things like this appearing on the radar of those who make policy. Therefore any screw up is nobodies fault and they can keep banking the cheques.
I happened to attend the retirement party for the Dean of the Faculty of Business at my alma mater, and he recounted the story of the hardest term of teaching he ever had, in his early days at the institution.
At 11:30-12:20, he taught a course on advertising. At 12:30-13:20, he taught a course on business ethics. Every time a student asked a question, he had to stop and remember which course he was teaching before he answered!
There was an article I read some time ago about a guy who writes term papers and such assignments for sale - he said his most frequent customers are "business ethics" course students. Makes you think.
It still appears as problematic as ever to me because a judge is pretty much the last person I would trust to decide what is and isn't evil.
I can't even imagine how a hypothetical well-intentioned judge who wanted to apply that provision correctly would proceed. The judge would basically have to choose between imposing their own personal view on good and evil or declaring the provision nonjusticiable.
Maybe the license could include a mandatory arbitration clause with an arbitrator who shares the author's values, but that still sounds like a terrible idea.
Still does. Nobody wants to be beholden to what one guy's definition of "evil" would be this morning. That doesn't mean ethics does not exist. It's just not done through copyright licensing.
I went in assuming someone's in charge, but honestly, most of the mistakes Google makes are in the category "nobody's in charge." They operate at a scale where everyone tries to use them to do everything. That's everything good and everything bad. They've been both a force for normalizing LGBTQ identity and a force against it, a mass communication tool and a mass oppression tool, a platform to help people and a platform to stalk people. They actively manage, observe, maintain, and regulate only a subset of the space of uses their tools allow.
This is explanation, not excuse. I'm not there anymore because I think it should be their responsibility to take responsibility reflective of their size and impact. I lost faith that the leadership agreed.
In this specific example, my assumption from personal priors is they let this ad in because there's nobody in charge of negative-filtering ads like this until complaints come, and in the absence of policy the default policy is "allow." They have categories to catch ads for illegal substances, various forms of illegal activity, and so on, but "A state-level actor will use our ad platform to paint a false message of the status of a political prisoner" is a new one for them.
> I'm not there anymore because I think it should be their responsibility to take responsibility reflective of their size and impact. I lost faith that the leadership agreed.
I fully agree with you, and I don't think that there's any going back: the founders don't care about this, a CEO generally only takes a principled stand on things like this when it's their baby, but Google is not Sundar's baby.
If it looks like nobody in Google is in charge, it's only because the execs refuse to take action and the board refuses to properly incentivize the execs.
And perhaps importantly: the board can't incentivize the execs. Not alone.
Alphabet is still majority-owned by the founders as of 2019. In practice, the board is advisory; 100% of stockholders who's names aren't "Larry Page" and "Sergey Brin" could vote the same on an issue, and the issue will carry in whatever direction Larry and Sergey say it should if both agree.
I dislike a lot of Google's practices as much as the next guy, but this is literally just a case of "nobody paying serious attention" rather than outright malice. We all (should) know that moderation at Google is mostly black-box bots that may or may not work properly.
Whether it's malicious or not, Google created this ecosystem where you need to process and serve a bazillion ads to compete with them, if they're unable to properly vet those ads it's on them to scale back to a size where they can properly vet them.
If this was a one-off issue then sure - but Google runs a lot of really slimy advertisements.
Yeah - beyond political issues they also just outright advertise pyramid schemes. I live in Hong Kong and most of the adverts here are for a clearly fraudulent scheme
that advertises by having young women screaming and showing a bank balance on a phone.
It's pretty telling that even small-ish video producers are willing to vet their advertising partners more thoroughly.
I think it does matter, because a decentralised system would have much greater problems moderating content than Google does today. If this was coming from the Belarusian government bidding for ad time on thousands of peertube instances and the response was piecemeal requests to each federated instance's admin team, then it would also take a very long time to remove from the system as a whole. It might well be impossible to remove it from every popular instance.
A better solution is for Google to hire more people to help with moderation. It's just that Google doesn't want to spend more money, it wants to make more profit.
> but this is literally just a case of "nobody paying serious attention" rather than outright malice.
Hate to break it to you, but that is how most evil in the world works-- through callous indifference and incompetence, not through some cartoon villain.
> this is literally just a case of "nobody paying serious attention" rather than outright malice
That's always been the case and it still doesn't matter. It would matter if this was an isolated thing that happened every once in a while, but the outcome has been the same, which makes it not matter when it's been going on for so long.
Except (if the allegations in the tweet are true) the issue has been brought to YouTube’s attention. It’s hard to plead innocent inadvertent ignorance if you were specifically put on notice.
