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.
