I’ve seen my niece and her friends get incredibly sexual ads on their YT before. Taught them both how to install adblock even on an iPhone and managed to make them not see that shit anymore. Mind you, my niece and her friends are FOURTEEN!
I felt like such an adult when they were getting excited that Fandom didn’t have ads anymore when I showed them what a DNS sinkhole is. This is what it means to be an adult. To use your wisdom to help the new generation navigate theirs.
That’s the best kind of praxis, because it will (hopefully) outlive you.
Is it really praxis tho? Like it is just being a good guardian to my niece and her friends. I get it to an extent that ‘ads are the price you pay for using a service for free’ but to what end? Google is a massive company and should vet the advertisements they allow a lot more.
The fact children are getting highly sexual ads is a failure on their part and I see blocking ads as a fair reprisal to them until they can sort themselves out. It’s my civil disobedience as a consumer. Like especially these days with how massively invasive ads have become.
Two thoughts :
- This particular example of adversarial advertising is directly targeting a competitor
- The author asks why Google aren’t using their AI tools to combat these, which is a fair question. Surely they are using AI, of course, but no chance in hell are they using the same Gemini the public gets. It’s going to be tailored to their ends, not the public-facing model the author interacted with.
I just reported an ad that used a national newspaper name and logo to send you to a fake Amazon page that uses Amazon name and logo. Google’s response: “We decided not to take this ad down. We found that the ad doesn’t go against Google’s policies”
This is really only an issue if you browse the WWW without adblock.
And it seems that this guy does it on a mobile device, which is the second mistake.
Because that makes them money. Next question.
It’s for a church. NEXT.
(If you’ve never seen it)
An all-time classic. You can hear the lead clanking in their bloodstream
Always gets a chuckle out of me
That was my knee jerk reaction, but then I thought,“Hey, don’t be one of those people that only read the headlines and react to the click bait!” So I opened it and read it. Yep, should have just stuck with that first reaction and saved myself 30 seconds. Money. It’s always money.
Because they’re blood soaked assholes who would be facing very uncomfortable consequences if there was justice in the world.
PSA: if you see a blood soaked asshole, refer them to a medical specialist as soon as possible.
This is why you should never try to remove hemorrhoids with a potato peeler.
Because the US refuses to regulate tech
even if they did try to regulate this it wouldn’t go away unless the regulations were completely overhanded. Those ads aren’t ran by reputable buisness so thry probably wouldn’t be affected by getting banned anyways.
But why won’t any other country do it either? Or are these ads only displaying to US IP addresses?
Because the US is aggressive towards countries that try. Also the companies are so large that they can exclude an entire country from their services.
A smaller country can take Facebook to court and might get a settlement but only a us court can truely punish them. With jail, breaking them up, law changes affecting their main customer base etc.
Exactly. Case in point: https://lemmy.zip/post/71167170
Why wouldn’t they?
It’s not like they face any consequences for being accessory to fraud. Laws are for poor people.
I have personalized ads turned of in YouTube and it seems half the ads are for gambling as of late.
Wow. That really stinks for gambling addicts. It’s like they can’t get away from it. A lot of YouTube channels advertise gambling apps too.
If you’re seeing ads on YouTube, you’re doing it wrong.
I find this kind of response insufferable. It shifts the conversation from a systems critique to personal responsibility. You could have posted this in response the OP, and it would be equally on point and useless.
Critique the system all you like. The system doesn’t care. Call it ‘insufferable’ if you like, but ads are more insufferable. If there’s a way to solve the problem myself without waiting until some corporate overlord deigns to change anything, I’ll do that every time.
I’ll do that every time.
Not everyone will though. It’s not because they’re not as principled as you are, maybe they just lack the know-how or time.
Sharing the how and why would be more helpful - otherwise you’re just coming off as holier-than-thou. And no one wants to engage with that.
Because Google’s corporate philosophy is “Anything for a buck” which is of course quite different from the “Dont Be Evil” they started with…
Google operated by “don’t be evil” right up until they merged with Double Click. That merger itself forcibly removed the “don’t.”
#1 money/greed
#2 ineffective governmentWith enough money and greed, you can make a very ineffective government.
Growing up you’re told “If it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense” and I think that sums up the answer to this question.
Because like all ad companies, Google gives way less of a shit if the ads are malicious than they do there being lots of ads displayed.
Before I put adblockers on everything, I was served an ad for a stupid mobile shooter game, either on YouTube or Facebook, that started with a real life hunter shooting a coyote in the neck, which made it cry out in pain and tumble down a hill.
Now as a matter of sanity, I block all ads. If they can’t keep crap like that from being advertised, then fuck off.
Money. Criminals and immoral people pay good money to show these ads. At least for Facebook, a court case regarding identity fraud has established that they knew quite well which ads were fishy, so they just charged those advertisers more. If I remember correctly, that amounted to about 10% of Facebook’s revenue. It will be a similar case for Google, I assume. Sketchy ads pay too well to remove all of them and laws make it so the platform is only liable if they don’t take it down after receiving notice of every single sketchy ad. Google, Facebook, and the others are all well near monopoly and built deep moats, so they don’t really have to fear losing customers, because there’s no simple alternative.
