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YouTube has never shied away from monetizing human rights abuses. I guess this is no different. Before watching this video of a journalist who was kidnapped an

YouTube has never shied away from monetizing human rights abuses. I guess this is no different. Before watching this video of a journalist who was kidnapped and possibly tortured to give you this false statement, here’s an ad about liberty mutual life insurance. Liberty!

dilyevsky 5y ago
Possibly? Look at his face
alfalfasprout 5y ago
Frankly it's stuff like this that gives me pause about ever working at a company like Google. It's truly disgusting.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  "Don't be Evil" is outdated. Now it's "Do the right thing".
  - zibzab 5y ago
    Do the right thing To get us another deal Sometimes it's a bit evil Sometimes just a bit shady And don't you ever worry If we cancel anything it will be Hangsout, Play Music, Timely and Poly
    - munk-a 5y ago
      I'm still sad over losing iGoogle.
  - Tade0 5y ago
    Suddenly the JSON license doesn't appear that problematic.
    - 746487482 5y ago
      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.
    - smsm42 5y ago
      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.
  - bjohnson225 5y ago
    That just invites the question “for who?”.
  - MichaelMoser123 5y ago
    new sloagan for Google: "we make money out of bloggers .... in any capacity".
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  It was an interesting experience. 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.
  - mleonhard 5y ago
    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.
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      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.
    - ocdtrekkie 5y ago
      "The board" is Larry and Sergey, from a realistic voting power standpoint. All of this is ultimately their fault.
  - 5y ago
- croes 5y ago
  Name any big company that values human rights over money. It's gonna be a short list.
  - brutal_chaos_ 5y ago
    I'm still looking and almost homeless. Our corporate culture is rotten to the core.
    - _carbyau_ 5y ago
      My wife is part way through an MBA. One course is "corporate ethics". When she told me, I laughed so hard... the very definition of an oxymoron.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - smsm42 5y ago
        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.
      - cperciva 5y ago
        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!
  - layer8 5y ago
    Sounds like a good reason not to work for a big company then.
  - IAmGraydon 5y ago
- ronsor 5y ago
  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.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    Here's the thing though. That doesn't matter. 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.
    - jawline 5y ago
      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.
    - strken 5y ago
      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.
      - Judgmentality 5y ago
        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.
- dominotw 5y ago
  > It's truly disgusting. But why are you not quitting. I am sure you can find another job within a week. Curious what you choose to stay.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    It’s not clear to me from their comment that they actually work at Google.
Farfromthehood 5y ago
At least the family has some proof of life. Maybe the videos can help push for his release. Although I'm sure these aren't the reasons YouTube approved the ad(s).
gipp 5y ago
I get responding to this with something like "YouTube's processes are broken." What doesn't make sense is "YouTube is happy to profit off human rights abuses." YT must deal with probably hundreds of new ads a day. They stand to gain nearly nothing from running this particular ad, and stand to lose quite a lot, even from a pure corporate-self-interest perspective. Which is more likely: that YT said "screw human rights abuses, gimme the cash" in full knowledge of what was going on, or that some contractor who had already reviewed a dozen that day and maybe hasn't even seen the news articles clicked a button without proper due diligence, and YT hadn't factored "what if a developed nation's government openly advertises human rights abuses" into its oversight processes?
- xwolfi 5y ago
  Yeah but you know it's hard to defend when they take money, show a tortured confession, don't reply to signal, then act as sorry pikachus years later when Belarus, so emboldened by western impotence, just pretends there are terrorist attacks just to arrest one journalist
hanniabu 5y ago
Likewise with animal rights abuse. There's tons of channel that make a living off abusing animals
Aunche 5y ago
It seems like preemptively complaining about downvoted, somehow increases your karma, so inb4 I get downvoted for being a "shill". This is the kind of reactionary attitude that causes YouTube to tune its moderation algorithms to be overly err on the side of demonetizing. Later, even more people will complain that their favorite YouTuber is being demonetized. Everyone has their own brilliant ideas of perfect moderation, but at the end of the day, they would never be willing to accept that responsibility themselves and the blowback that comes with it. See the grandstanding that occured during the section 230 Congressional hearings as a perfect example. Why can't YouTube simply just make a mistake and correct for it? When governments failed to protect a plane from being forcibly escorted, I don't see why people expect a private business to fix all the world's geopolitical issues.
- zwkrt 5y ago
  The problem with YouTube isn’t the specific way it is moderated it is the entire ecosystem it creates. It is addictive for end users. It devalues “content” (an advertising term for the things on the page that aren’t ads) that doesn’t hook users. It is hostile to creative projects that don’t carefully avoid IP or monetization guidelines. It has no incentive to uphold the public interest in terms of information distributed, liberties upheld, or mental health. Like a paper clip maximizer YouTube has a singular goal of increasing revenue; users, children, content, creators, employees, and international peace be damned.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  > YouTube to tune its moderation algorithms to be overly err on the side of demonetizing. Yeah but this video is of a political prisoner who was tortured and the account is a government account. The youtubers getting improperly demonetized are often minorities with content that could be offensive to some group of people (eg. gay youtubers talking about their life... is offensive to extremely religious people). There is a big moderation quality gap between "official government posts torture prisoners" and "random gay 21yo in LA describes college life". I DO expect youtube to be able to get this balance at least right, all of the time.
- drzaiusapelord 5y ago
dzhiurgis 5y ago
Their CEO awarded herself freedom of speech award.
xmprt 5y ago
It's really strange how companies are so quick to advertise human rights violations while demonitizing any content that is even slightly sexual or not brand friendly. There are arguments for both sides but companies aren't even internally consistent.

dilyevsky 5y ago

Possibly? Look at his face

alfalfasprout 5y ago

Frankly it's stuff like this that gives me pause about ever working at a company like Google. It's truly disgusting.

BitwiseFool 5y ago
"Don't be Evil" is outdated. Now it's "Do the right thing".
- zibzab 5y ago
  Do the right thing To get us another deal Sometimes it's a bit evil Sometimes just a bit shady And don't you ever worry If we cancel anything it will be Hangsout, Play Music, Timely and Poly
  - munk-a 5y ago
    I'm still sad over losing iGoogle.
- Tade0 5y ago
  Suddenly the JSON license doesn't appear that problematic.
  - 746487482 5y ago
    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.
  - smsm42 5y ago
    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.
- bjohnson225 5y ago
  That just invites the question “for who?”.
- MichaelMoser123 5y ago
  new sloagan for Google: "we make money out of bloggers .... in any capacity".
shadowgovt 5y ago
It was an interesting experience. 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.
- mleonhard 5y ago
  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.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    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.
  - ocdtrekkie 5y ago
    "The board" is Larry and Sergey, from a realistic voting power standpoint. All of this is ultimately their fault.
- 5y ago
croes 5y ago
Name any big company that values human rights over money. It's gonna be a short list.
- brutal_chaos_ 5y ago
  I'm still looking and almost homeless. Our corporate culture is rotten to the core.
  - _carbyau_ 5y ago
    My wife is part way through an MBA. One course is "corporate ethics". When she told me, I laughed so hard... the very definition of an oxymoron.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - smsm42 5y ago
      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.
    - cperciva 5y ago
      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!
- layer8 5y ago
  Sounds like a good reason not to work for a big company then.
- IAmGraydon 5y ago
ronsor 5y ago
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.
- munk-a 5y ago
  Here's the thing though. That doesn't matter. 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.
  - jawline 5y ago
    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.
  - strken 5y ago
    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.
    - Judgmentality 5y ago
      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.
dominotw 5y ago
> It's truly disgusting. But why are you not quitting. I am sure you can find another job within a week. Curious what you choose to stay.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  It’s not clear to me from their comment that they actually work at Google.

Farfromthehood 5y ago

At least the family has some proof of life. Maybe the videos can help push for his release. Although I'm sure these aren't the reasons YouTube approved the ad(s).

gipp 5y ago

I get responding to this with something like "YouTube's processes are broken." What doesn't make sense is "YouTube is happy to profit off human rights abuses." YT must deal with probably hundreds of new ads a day. They stand to gain nearly nothing from running this particular ad, and stand to lose quite a lot, even from a pure corporate-self-interest perspective. Which is more likely: that YT said "screw human rights abuses, gimme the cash" in full knowledge of what was going on, or that some contractor who had already reviewed a dozen that day and maybe hasn't even seen the news articles clicked a button without proper due diligence, and YT hadn't factored "what if a developed nation's government openly advertises human rights abuses" into its oversight processes?

xwolfi 5y ago
Yeah but you know it's hard to defend when they take money, show a tortured confession, don't reply to signal, then act as sorry pikachus years later when Belarus, so emboldened by western impotence, just pretends there are terrorist attacks just to arrest one journalist

hanniabu 5y ago

Likewise with animal rights abuse. There's tons of channel that make a living off abusing animals

Aunche 5y ago

It seems like preemptively complaining about downvoted, somehow increases your karma, so inb4 I get downvoted for being a "shill". This is the kind of reactionary attitude that causes YouTube to tune its moderation algorithms to be overly err on the side of demonetizing. Later, even more people will complain that their favorite YouTuber is being demonetized. Everyone has their own brilliant ideas of perfect moderation, but at the end of the day, they would never be willing to accept that responsibility themselves and the blowback that comes with it. See the grandstanding that occured during the section 230 Congressional hearings as a perfect example. Why can't YouTube simply just make a mistake and correct for it? When governments failed to protect a plane from being forcibly escorted, I don't see why people expect a private business to fix all the world's geopolitical issues.

zwkrt 5y ago
The problem with YouTube isn’t the specific way it is moderated it is the entire ecosystem it creates. It is addictive for end users. It devalues “content” (an advertising term for the things on the page that aren’t ads) that doesn’t hook users. It is hostile to creative projects that don’t carefully avoid IP or monetization guidelines. It has no incentive to uphold the public interest in terms of information distributed, liberties upheld, or mental health. Like a paper clip maximizer YouTube has a singular goal of increasing revenue; users, children, content, creators, employees, and international peace be damned.
vineyardmike 5y ago
> YouTube to tune its moderation algorithms to be overly err on the side of demonetizing. Yeah but this video is of a political prisoner who was tortured and the account is a government account. The youtubers getting improperly demonetized are often minorities with content that could be offensive to some group of people (eg. gay youtubers talking about their life... is offensive to extremely religious people). There is a big moderation quality gap between "official government posts torture prisoners" and "random gay 21yo in LA describes college life". I DO expect youtube to be able to get this balance at least right, all of the time.
drzaiusapelord 5y ago

dzhiurgis 5y ago

Their CEO awarded herself freedom of speech award.

xmprt 5y ago

It's really strange how companies are so quick to advertise human rights violations while demonitizing any content that is even slightly sexual or not brand friendly. There are arguments for both sides but companies aren't even internally consistent.