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My livelihood depends on online advertising and yet I have the opposite feelings. Google (and Facebook and Reddit etc) should be doing more content policing, es

My livelihood depends on online advertising and yet I have the opposite feelings. Google (and Facebook and Reddit etc) should be doing more content policing, especially for the content monetized by advertising, and should be held liable for the content which they monetize. Right now, no one is responsible for the poisonous mixture of fake-news / radicalizing context coupled with attention based internet economy where the only incentive an internet content business has is to grab more and more eyeballs. Google (and others) simply shirk their failures by claiming "to give users what they want", when instead their employees are busy devising more and more elaborate ways to grab someone's eyeballs.

philliphaydon 9y ago
> Right now, no one is responsible for the poisonous mixture of fake-news / radicalizing contex Who decides what’s fake news. Trump said there was problems in Sweden. NYTimes called him out on it. Not even a year later they are writing about the problems in Sweden. So was the fake news trumps comment? Or the denile and lying by the media? Maybe we should just censor everything. Censor trump, the media, advertising, everything. Not like the media is worth a grain of salt these days.
- vasilipupkin 9y ago
  But it matters what exactly he said and what exactly NY Times writes. For example, if I write in all caps SWEDEN IS DYING, ECONOMY iN SHAMBLES - SAD! - this would be a lie and not useful content and google can decide to remove it and we would be no worse off.
- ptaipale 9y ago
  Although you get downvoted, that is a very valid question. Right now there is a process going on in Sweden to change the country's constitution, thus enabling the government to perform more censorship. It is fueled e.g. by established newspapers and tabloids who campaign against Google, Wordpress and other Internet companies. Who gets to decide what is fake news? I am concerned by this trend. Instead of more open and more honest reporting in mainstream media, the governments try to silence those who post controversial stories - even when they are true, or at least not any more false than "accepted" news. [Trump's comment about Sweden was false in the sense that "last night" nothing very unusual happened in Sweden; it was true in the sense that every night there were some things that you wouldn't expect from a country that has been so stable for so long as Sweden has, even though the claims about "civil war" in Sweden are highly exaggerated.]
- herbst 9y ago
  Exactly this. Fake news just is a way to proclaim unwanted propaganda as something bad. This does not always mean the wanted propaganda is less a lie or the unwanted is a lie to begin with.
- soundwave106 9y ago
  For Google, the answer is pretty clear: the advertisers decide what content is acceptable or not acceptable. It is pretty clear (like the parent indicated) that the pressure to demonetize is coming from the advertisers. And it's not really "fake news" that I've heard the most about, it's content that is deemed objectionable to their image. Not many companies are going to accept appearing next to terrorist recruiting videos, or racist material, or videos that appeared to be child predatory (all headline-grabbing incidents of late). Large companies also tend to shy away from "controversial" / "radical" politics as well, so there's no question that some of those are going to be targeted. This is the consequence of the nature of the beast: a broadcast platform that lives off of advertisements. You can't force Google to not do what their advertisers want. I see no reason at this time why those with advertiser-unfriendly viewpoints can set up alternative platforms, that do not necessarily need to cater to big-corporate advertisers. At this point (at least in the United States), you don't have the situation in some nations where there is just one viewpoint (the state media) and alternative opinions are silenced not by demonitization, but by police/army force.
gandutraveler 9y ago
This whole fake news/ads can be solved by allowing consumer's to see which company/person posted the ad.

philliphaydon 9y ago

> Right now, no one is responsible for the poisonous mixture of fake-news / radicalizing contex Who decides what’s fake news. Trump said there was problems in Sweden. NYTimes called him out on it. Not even a year later they are writing about the problems in Sweden. So was the fake news trumps comment? Or the denile and lying by the media? Maybe we should just censor everything. Censor trump, the media, advertising, everything. Not like the media is worth a grain of salt these days.

vasilipupkin 9y ago
But it matters what exactly he said and what exactly NY Times writes. For example, if I write in all caps SWEDEN IS DYING, ECONOMY iN SHAMBLES - SAD! - this would be a lie and not useful content and google can decide to remove it and we would be no worse off.
ptaipale 9y ago
Although you get downvoted, that is a very valid question. Right now there is a process going on in Sweden to change the country's constitution, thus enabling the government to perform more censorship. It is fueled e.g. by established newspapers and tabloids who campaign against Google, Wordpress and other Internet companies. Who gets to decide what is fake news? I am concerned by this trend. Instead of more open and more honest reporting in mainstream media, the governments try to silence those who post controversial stories - even when they are true, or at least not any more false than "accepted" news. [Trump's comment about Sweden was false in the sense that "last night" nothing very unusual happened in Sweden; it was true in the sense that every night there were some things that you wouldn't expect from a country that has been so stable for so long as Sweden has, even though the claims about "civil war" in Sweden are highly exaggerated.]
herbst 9y ago
Exactly this. Fake news just is a way to proclaim unwanted propaganda as something bad. This does not always mean the wanted propaganda is less a lie or the unwanted is a lie to begin with.
soundwave106 9y ago
For Google, the answer is pretty clear: the advertisers decide what content is acceptable or not acceptable. It is pretty clear (like the parent indicated) that the pressure to demonetize is coming from the advertisers. And it's not really "fake news" that I've heard the most about, it's content that is deemed objectionable to their image. Not many companies are going to accept appearing next to terrorist recruiting videos, or racist material, or videos that appeared to be child predatory (all headline-grabbing incidents of late). Large companies also tend to shy away from "controversial" / "radical" politics as well, so there's no question that some of those are going to be targeted. This is the consequence of the nature of the beast: a broadcast platform that lives off of advertisements. You can't force Google to not do what their advertisers want. I see no reason at this time why those with advertiser-unfriendly viewpoints can set up alternative platforms, that do not necessarily need to cater to big-corporate advertisers. At this point (at least in the United States), you don't have the situation in some nations where there is just one viewpoint (the state media) and alternative opinions are silenced not by demonitization, but by police/army force.

gandutraveler 9y ago

This whole fake news/ads can be solved by allowing consumer's to see which company/person posted the ad.