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They're all like that. A whole back I reported an obvious real estate scam using Wayne Gretzky and some Blue Jays player (I'm in Canada). The reply was it didn'

They're all like that. A whole back I reported an obvious real estate scam using Wayne Gretzky and some Blue Jays player (I'm in Canada). The reply was it didn't break any policy. When ads are the primary source of revenue, there's zero incentive to police the platform

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
> (I'm in Canada) The reply was it didn't break any policy. When ads are the primary source of revenue, there's zero incentive to police the platform TL;DR: If you're a major on-line ad distributor like Google/Meta, and broadcast malicious ads to consumers, then you should be liable for them according to local laws just how TV and radio broadcasters are liable for the same thing. Long argument: Sure those ads don't break Youtube/Google's own internal policy (why would they, they're an ad company reporting to their shareholders), but what about breaking the nation's/Canada's policy on ads? I bet there might be some fines there to be handed out. Hear me out. If such scams aren't legally allowed on licensed national TV and radio channels or printed media, otherwise the broadcasters and publishers would face crippling fines, then why do we as government agencies allow Youtube to get away with broadcasting these scams to its viewers? Sure, Youtube is not a licensed TV broadcaster but maybe we should start regulating them partly as such, similarly how the EU's Digital Markets Act aims to fix current major digital gatekeepers and make them as compliant as physical markets. I mean, one of the main reasons big-tech has reaped such insane profits is that the same regulations that apply to traditional physical businesses like brick and mortar markets and media broadcasters, did not apply to them because they operated on the unregulated Wild West that was the internet, while also extracting all the global profits that come from operating on such a global scale except with none of the costs assigned to local legal regulatory compliance that operating physical business have. So now it's time to patch these digital loopholes and have big-tech operating in the ad space just as accountable as the rest of the businesses, considering their size, outreach and therefore influence on the gen-pop. Google's not a scrappy start-up anymore, they can definitely afford to police the ads they serve according to the local laws, considering their size, workforce, ML tech and profits. Same with Meta and their ad network.
- cool_dude85 3y ago
  For what it's worth, I've noticed a proliferation of scam ads on the radio over the past few years. Go to this website and get free cash now kind of stuff.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    Where? In Europe I haven't heard any scams on radio.
    - cool_dude85 3y ago
      In the US, Florida specifically.
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        While I don't live in the US, my experience with advertising there while visiting Miami was pretty crazy to say the least. I heard it before when playing GTA Vice City on the in game radio and thought it's just satire, but no, it's actually pretty accurate. "Ask your doctor..."
  - rolph 3y ago
    this could just as easily been pirate, or legitimate broadcast. that would be a new take on scams, to use SDR to spoof a station, and broadcast scam materials as the big end of the funnel to a scam url.
- vannevar 3y ago
  If you're a major on-line ad distributor like Google/Meta, and broadcast malicious ads to consumers... It's actually worse than that. If they were neutrally broadcasting, they'd at least have the argument that they were conceptually just a common carrier providing a neutral conduit between advertisers and consumers. But they are actively selecting which ads to present to which consumers---with respect to scam ads, they are preferentially sending scams to the people they believe are most likely to fall for them, and profiting as a result. They are not neutral conduits, but active participants in the underlying fraud. Note that Section 230 only means they are not treated as a publisher or speaker of the fraudulent offer. That does not mean that they could not be held liable for an independent act in furtherance of the fraud, such as identifying vulnerable targets in collusion with the scammers and preferentially presenting the fraud to those targets.
ren_engineer 3y ago
between the scam ads and their war on adblock it really seems like Google is scraping for every penny they can
- ploum 3y ago
  Well, that’s the definition of a private company, isn’t it? It would be naive to think a company could behave otherwise in the long term.
- iteratethis 3y ago
  Yep, it's a high interest rate phenomenon. Investors want to see profitability. But it's also a problem unique to trillion dollar companies: finding growth. If you have a money printer of $280B per year, how do you find growth that moves the needle? For new product development, you'd need to launch a product that brings in revenue of say $20B, otherwise it's just not that interesting. Imagine how hard it is to launch a new product like that? If you'd have a billion users (which is absurdly hard for a new product), you'd then need to monetize them for $20 per year per user. In a saturated competitive environment where users don't want to pay. Hence, the more common strategy is to turn some dials on the existing money printer. Just increase ads. That's why FB's Metaverse bet wasn't crazy at all. You make $100B+, social media is stagnating, and you need a huge new revenue stream. They don't really exist. You have to go crazy on big bets.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    > it's a high interest rate phenomenon Well, it's more of an interest rate change phenomenon. All companies are currently overvalued by absurd amounts, but the computer-related ones have it dialed a few dozen notches above "absurd". Things became this way because of the zero interest rate (and the expectation that it was permanent), but it's not sustainable anymore.
    - vkou 3y ago
      > All companies are currently overvalued by absurd amounts, but the computer-related ones have it dialed a few dozen notches above "absurd". Google's P/E is 25.6 S&P 500 is at 24.59 DJIA is at 26.35 There are exactly 4 'computer' companies among the 30 companies that make up the DJIA. If you're looking for overvalued, that would be Tesla at 70.3, or Amazon (Who reinvests aggressively) at 75.6.
bluGill 3y ago
There is incentive, but they don't realize it. I know that online ads are often enough scams, so I won't buy anything from those ads. I do have to take effort to ensure that they don't effect me anyway (hint from basic psychology: they do, but I can make that effect less). If they did some work to ensure ads were not scams - I've seen ads for a number of interesting things that I intentionally did not buy because odds it was a scam was too high.
- Takennickname 3y ago
  You are almost irrelevant to the conversation. The scammers only need 100 people to believe them from the potentially millions of people who view their ad to make it profitable. You are not grasping the scale of the matter.
  - benterix 3y ago
    Well, I guess it might change. I witnessed an exchange between two women, one was saying she would consider buying something after she saw an ad on Instagram, the other one laughed, "but you know ads on Instagram are scams, don't you"? So my guess is that even though scammers are still finding victims, the side effect is that more and more people are mentally equating ads with scams and the whole "industry" loses - both big brands ("is someone impersonating them, just like they usually do with famous people?") and small ones ("I've never heard of them, it's probably scam like the rest").
  - ivanbakel 3y ago
    You're missing the GP's point. They're claiming that scam ads pollute the ad marketplace and drive away engagement. Why click on an ad, or even pay attention to it, if there's a good chance it's a scam? And why would advertisers pay for ads if consumers are not engaging with them? Thus, Google has an incentive to keep the ad space free of scams - it makes Google users more valuable to advertisers.
    - onion2k 3y ago
      Maybe the fact Google doesn't police Ads is a signal that advertising isn't as lucrative as it once was...
cardosof 3y ago
>The reply was it didn't break any policy. What is the policy, as long as you pay and don't do anything outright offensive, it's all fair game?
- sligor 3y ago
  The problem is that big companies don't want to broadcast their serious ad along scam ads¹. That is a serious treat for Youtube revenues. ¹ At least I wouldn't if I was doing ad campaigns of a big company, but maybe I'm naive...
  - bluGill 3y ago
    The scams are a risk for some lawyer in some country suing YouTube. They bring in a lot of money now so YouTube is not interesting in policing them, but they are a risk that they will suddenly go away for legal reasons. which is why I don't understand why YouTube doesn't police them now - between the potential loss in court and the big companies staying away there is a lot of risk to YouTube. Note too that if YouTube would police scam ads better they would have a better message to various countries that laws and legal action is not needed at all. Right now I'm shocked the EU hasn't put in place harsh laws about ads - if YouTube would police their own ads they could have a slightly less harsh policy in place and thus make it not worth while for the EU to pass the harsh law they don't like.
ForkMeOnTinder 3y ago
It's even worse: the incentive is to police the creators, not the advertisers. Youtube will bend over backwards for advertisers whose "brand safety" team doesn't want their product to appear next to a swear word, and demonetize/strike/etc those creators. But the ad content itself isn't policed nearly as relentlessly.
- TazeTSchnitzel 3y ago
  You'd think that creators making people want to use the site would be important, but unfortunately YouTube is a monopoly and is addictive, so content is more or less fungible from Google's perspective. If you aren't viewing ads on creator A's content, you'll probably be viewing them on creator B's content instead. It's not like other streaming services where there is real competition and losing particular content would make people go to competitors.
  - dspillett 3y ago
    > You'd think that creators making people want to use the site would be important YouTube's audience size and advertising metrics have long since gone through the point where individual creators or groups of them matter little. If a creator walks off the platform there are more who will fill the place, in search of potential monetisation, so youtube will still have somewhere to hang adverts off. An advertiser leaving is harder to replace than a content provider. eBay has a similar flip some years ago: they realised that there was more value caring for buyers needs than sellers: sellers swarm in attracted by the number of buyers and are difficult to put off for long as there are often few other options, buyers need to feel safe to hand around.
    - bcrosby95 3y ago
      It's quite obvious they either have advertiser problems or their ad serving algorithm sucks. I get so many repeats in stuff I'm not interested in at all, and completely unrelated to what I watch. I don't know if it's a matter of those ads bidding the highest or what. But YouTube's ability to show something I'm interested in is worse than even what the daytime TV ads were back in the day.
dspillett 3y ago
> They're all like that. Yep. I stopped bothering to report obvious scams on Facebook as any response I got was they didn't breach any standards (for others I got no response at all), yet I've had a comment removed because calling someone a numbskull was unduly rude/aggressive/whatever (I forget the exact complaint given). For a while I added comments details why it was so obvious the scam posts were scams, but this has little effect as my comment would be quickly drowned out by the many “I got mine OK!” and “thanks!” comments that are presumably placed by compromised accounts. It also backfires: commenting, even to point out the scammyness, is interaction – that interaction tells the recommendation algorithms that I might want to see more of that sort of thing or worse that my friends/family would also.
- mavamaarten 3y ago
  For Facebook though, I understand why they want the scammers to continue using their platform. Every scammer that uses facebook is an active user, which is a KPI they very much want to keep high.
  - ASalazarMX 3y ago
    Twitter is the same. As an exercise in atrition, I've reported dozens of evidently fake accounts pushing the same scam ads (miracle cures and crypto investments mainly), not a single response aside from "We received your report". In my experience, Twitter was more responsive to reports (even if still wanting) before Elon Musk bought it.
mywacaday 3y ago
When the Irish Tánaiste (US VP equivalent) and former Taoiseach (President equivalent) has to go to court and looses when he tries to find out from google who is advertising using his identity you know the whole think is a sham that has to be protected at all costs, https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/courts/2023/12/06/tanaiste-takes-legal-action-against-google-in-bid-to-get-information-about-online-ads-using-his-name/ https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/courts/2023/12/06/tanai...
- klvino 3y ago
  In contrast. A third party created a bogus profile of a global brand and began releasing unfavorable content as though they were the brand. The global brand leveraged their relationship with Google to shutdown the profile (which could be labeled as satirical). Google went on to provide the private account and contact info of the third party posting. It was discovered the third-party was a subcontractor/vendor to the global brand. The global brand shut down all work with the party and had them black-balled in their industry. The Irish gov't wasn't spending enough ad dollars for Google to care.
  - smcin 3y ago
    Does either of you have a link, or screenshot? Hard to tell otherwise whether it was a scam ad promoting financial products online, or satire (that sounds dubious), or both.
  - tremon 3y ago
    I'm sorry, but this is unparseable to me. Who did what now?
- idlephysicist 3y ago
  > has to go to court and looses[sic] when he tries to find out from google who is advertising using his identity I believe from the article that you linked that the case is still before the High Court and so he has not lost yet. I wonder would the case have been better made as an instance of identity theft? Also while you are accurate in saying that the Tánaiste is equivalent to the Vice President in U.S. terms, because they are the deputy head of government. The same being true with respect to Taoiseach. I would like to point out that they are not the same positions. While the U.S. President is commander in chief of the U.S. military, the Taoiseach is not the command in chief in Ireland – that falls to the Uachtarán (the President). Tánaiste = Deputy Prime Minister Taoiseach = Prime Minister Uachtarán = President
lp0_on_fire 3y ago
> When ads are the primary source of revenue, there's zero incentive to police the platform And with the promise of impressions (or whatever the equivalent of eyeballs is nowadays) there's little incentive to police the platform for bots.
GuB-42 3y ago
But then, it there is no incentive to police the platform, there should be sexual content in ads, and yet, I don't even remember seeing ads for vibrators or other "soft" adult stuff. I don't remember seeing ads for weapons either. There are scams, but not many obvious counterfeits. To be fair, I block ads, so I don't see many, but the few times I don't have them blocked, they are usually the kind you see on TV: big brand products, blockbuster video games, etc... with the very occasional scam and maybe a few of these fake games. But nothing like what you get on shady sites like porn, torrents, etc... and email spam.
- BobaFloutist 3y ago
  There are ads for sports betting though, which is absolutely "adult", it's just less likely to trigger culture-war arguments.
  - GuB-42 3y ago
    That's actually what I mean, YouTube polices ads based on how controversial it may be, it means they care. Probably because it may hurt their viewership, or drive off other advertisers. And they don't seem to do it to comply with some laws, or making it more kid friendly since, as you said, sports betting gets a pass, even if it is absolutely "adult" and maybe even illegal in some countries. Obviously, scams are illegal too. It just mean they think scams don't give them enough of a bad reputation to police against, which is weird do me, one would think that reputable brands wouldn't want to appear next to scammers.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
There was a time before people called websites "platforms". A time before gigantic websites full of thousands of other people's uploaded files, where the websites are used for surveillance and advertising delivery. The operators of these mega websites, posing as so-called "tech" companies, argue they are providing a valuable "service" to web users, valued at a price of zero dollars. Truly they are only interested in providing a service to advertisers. If advertisers stop paying, the operators will be forced to scale back the surveillance as it's too expensive to host peoples' files for free. If people are paying for their own hosting, like they pay for internet access, then third party websites cannot claim ownership to access logs for peoples' files and other metadata that is useful for advertising.
- ChadNauseam 3y ago
  If they were only providing a service to the advertisers, why would non-advertisers use their site, and even sit through ads?
  - Wool2662 3y ago
    Because they have enough money and data now to just obliterate any kind of serious competition. They only need to keep providing minimal value to actual users. That's why.
givemeethekeys 3y ago
They definitely police the platform. They make sure that anyone who uploads content that threatens ad revenue is appropriately disciplined.
juanpicardo 3y ago
Last time I reported one the replied said that even thought the ad broke their policies, they wouldn't remove it

FirmwareBurner 3y ago

> (I'm in Canada) The reply was it didn't break any policy. When ads are the primary source of revenue, there's zero incentive to police the platform TL;DR: If you're a major on-line ad distributor like Google/Meta, and broadcast malicious ads to consumers, then you should be liable for them according to local laws just how TV and radio broadcasters are liable for the same thing. Long argument: Sure those ads don't break Youtube/Google's own internal policy (why would they, they're an ad company reporting to their shareholders), but what about breaking the nation's/Canada's policy on ads? I bet there might be some fines there to be handed out. Hear me out. If such scams aren't legally allowed on licensed national TV and radio channels or printed media, otherwise the broadcasters and publishers would face crippling fines, then why do we as government agencies allow Youtube to get away with broadcasting these scams to its viewers? Sure, Youtube is not a licensed TV broadcaster but maybe we should start regulating them partly as such, similarly how the EU's Digital Markets Act aims to fix current major digital gatekeepers and make them as compliant as physical markets. I mean, one of the main reasons big-tech has reaped such insane profits is that the same regulations that apply to traditional physical businesses like brick and mortar markets and media broadcasters, did not apply to them because they operated on the unregulated Wild West that was the internet, while also extracting all the global profits that come from operating on such a global scale except with none of the costs assigned to local legal regulatory compliance that operating physical business have. So now it's time to patch these digital loopholes and have big-tech operating in the ad space just as accountable as the rest of the businesses, considering their size, outreach and therefore influence on the gen-pop. Google's not a scrappy start-up anymore, they can definitely afford to police the ads they serve according to the local laws, considering their size, workforce, ML tech and profits. Same with Meta and their ad network.

cool_dude85 3y ago
For what it's worth, I've noticed a proliferation of scam ads on the radio over the past few years. Go to this website and get free cash now kind of stuff.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Where? In Europe I haven't heard any scams on radio.
  - cool_dude85 3y ago
    In the US, Florida specifically.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      While I don't live in the US, my experience with advertising there while visiting Miami was pretty crazy to say the least. I heard it before when playing GTA Vice City on the in game radio and thought it's just satire, but no, it's actually pretty accurate. "Ask your doctor..."
- rolph 3y ago
  this could just as easily been pirate, or legitimate broadcast. that would be a new take on scams, to use SDR to spoof a station, and broadcast scam materials as the big end of the funnel to a scam url.
vannevar 3y ago
If you're a major on-line ad distributor like Google/Meta, and broadcast malicious ads to consumers... It's actually worse than that. If they were neutrally broadcasting, they'd at least have the argument that they were conceptually just a common carrier providing a neutral conduit between advertisers and consumers. But they are actively selecting which ads to present to which consumers---with respect to scam ads, they are preferentially sending scams to the people they believe are most likely to fall for them, and profiting as a result. They are not neutral conduits, but active participants in the underlying fraud. Note that Section 230 only means they are not treated as a publisher or speaker of the fraudulent offer. That does not mean that they could not be held liable for an independent act in furtherance of the fraud, such as identifying vulnerable targets in collusion with the scammers and preferentially presenting the fraud to those targets.

ren_engineer 3y ago

between the scam ads and their war on adblock it really seems like Google is scraping for every penny they can

ploum 3y ago
Well, that’s the definition of a private company, isn’t it? It would be naive to think a company could behave otherwise in the long term.
iteratethis 3y ago
Yep, it's a high interest rate phenomenon. Investors want to see profitability. But it's also a problem unique to trillion dollar companies: finding growth. If you have a money printer of $280B per year, how do you find growth that moves the needle? For new product development, you'd need to launch a product that brings in revenue of say $20B, otherwise it's just not that interesting. Imagine how hard it is to launch a new product like that? If you'd have a billion users (which is absurdly hard for a new product), you'd then need to monetize them for $20 per year per user. In a saturated competitive environment where users don't want to pay. Hence, the more common strategy is to turn some dials on the existing money printer. Just increase ads. That's why FB's Metaverse bet wasn't crazy at all. You make $100B+, social media is stagnating, and you need a huge new revenue stream. They don't really exist. You have to go crazy on big bets.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  > it's a high interest rate phenomenon Well, it's more of an interest rate change phenomenon. All companies are currently overvalued by absurd amounts, but the computer-related ones have it dialed a few dozen notches above "absurd". Things became this way because of the zero interest rate (and the expectation that it was permanent), but it's not sustainable anymore.
  - vkou 3y ago
    > All companies are currently overvalued by absurd amounts, but the computer-related ones have it dialed a few dozen notches above "absurd". Google's P/E is 25.6 S&P 500 is at 24.59 DJIA is at 26.35 There are exactly 4 'computer' companies among the 30 companies that make up the DJIA. If you're looking for overvalued, that would be Tesla at 70.3, or Amazon (Who reinvests aggressively) at 75.6.

bluGill 3y ago

There is incentive, but they don't realize it. I know that online ads are often enough scams, so I won't buy anything from those ads. I do have to take effort to ensure that they don't effect me anyway (hint from basic psychology: they do, but I can make that effect less). If they did some work to ensure ads were not scams - I've seen ads for a number of interesting things that I intentionally did not buy because odds it was a scam was too high.

Takennickname 3y ago
You are almost irrelevant to the conversation. The scammers only need 100 people to believe them from the potentially millions of people who view their ad to make it profitable. You are not grasping the scale of the matter.
- benterix 3y ago
  Well, I guess it might change. I witnessed an exchange between two women, one was saying she would consider buying something after she saw an ad on Instagram, the other one laughed, "but you know ads on Instagram are scams, don't you"? So my guess is that even though scammers are still finding victims, the side effect is that more and more people are mentally equating ads with scams and the whole "industry" loses - both big brands ("is someone impersonating them, just like they usually do with famous people?") and small ones ("I've never heard of them, it's probably scam like the rest").
- ivanbakel 3y ago
  You're missing the GP's point. They're claiming that scam ads pollute the ad marketplace and drive away engagement. Why click on an ad, or even pay attention to it, if there's a good chance it's a scam? And why would advertisers pay for ads if consumers are not engaging with them? Thus, Google has an incentive to keep the ad space free of scams - it makes Google users more valuable to advertisers.
  - onion2k 3y ago
    Maybe the fact Google doesn't police Ads is a signal that advertising isn't as lucrative as it once was...

cardosof 3y ago

>The reply was it didn't break any policy. What is the policy, as long as you pay and don't do anything outright offensive, it's all fair game?

sligor 3y ago
The problem is that big companies don't want to broadcast their serious ad along scam ads¹. That is a serious treat for Youtube revenues. ¹ At least I wouldn't if I was doing ad campaigns of a big company, but maybe I'm naive...
- bluGill 3y ago
  The scams are a risk for some lawyer in some country suing YouTube. They bring in a lot of money now so YouTube is not interesting in policing them, but they are a risk that they will suddenly go away for legal reasons. which is why I don't understand why YouTube doesn't police them now - between the potential loss in court and the big companies staying away there is a lot of risk to YouTube. Note too that if YouTube would police scam ads better they would have a better message to various countries that laws and legal action is not needed at all. Right now I'm shocked the EU hasn't put in place harsh laws about ads - if YouTube would police their own ads they could have a slightly less harsh policy in place and thus make it not worth while for the EU to pass the harsh law they don't like.

ForkMeOnTinder 3y ago

It's even worse: the incentive is to police the creators, not the advertisers. Youtube will bend over backwards for advertisers whose "brand safety" team doesn't want their product to appear next to a swear word, and demonetize/strike/etc those creators. But the ad content itself isn't policed nearly as relentlessly.

TazeTSchnitzel 3y ago
You'd think that creators making people want to use the site would be important, but unfortunately YouTube is a monopoly and is addictive, so content is more or less fungible from Google's perspective. If you aren't viewing ads on creator A's content, you'll probably be viewing them on creator B's content instead. It's not like other streaming services where there is real competition and losing particular content would make people go to competitors.
- dspillett 3y ago
  > You'd think that creators making people want to use the site would be important YouTube's audience size and advertising metrics have long since gone through the point where individual creators or groups of them matter little. If a creator walks off the platform there are more who will fill the place, in search of potential monetisation, so youtube will still have somewhere to hang adverts off. An advertiser leaving is harder to replace than a content provider. eBay has a similar flip some years ago: they realised that there was more value caring for buyers needs than sellers: sellers swarm in attracted by the number of buyers and are difficult to put off for long as there are often few other options, buyers need to feel safe to hand around.
  - bcrosby95 3y ago
    It's quite obvious they either have advertiser problems or their ad serving algorithm sucks. I get so many repeats in stuff I'm not interested in at all, and completely unrelated to what I watch. I don't know if it's a matter of those ads bidding the highest or what. But YouTube's ability to show something I'm interested in is worse than even what the daytime TV ads were back in the day.

dspillett 3y ago

> They're all like that. Yep. I stopped bothering to report obvious scams on Facebook as any response I got was they didn't breach any standards (for others I got no response at all), yet I've had a comment removed because calling someone a numbskull was unduly rude/aggressive/whatever (I forget the exact complaint given). For a while I added comments details why it was so obvious the scam posts were scams, but this has little effect as my comment would be quickly drowned out by the many “I got mine OK!” and “thanks!” comments that are presumably placed by compromised accounts. It also backfires: commenting, even to point out the scammyness, is interaction – that interaction tells the recommendation algorithms that I might want to see more of that sort of thing or worse that my friends/family would also.

mavamaarten 3y ago
For Facebook though, I understand why they want the scammers to continue using their platform. Every scammer that uses facebook is an active user, which is a KPI they very much want to keep high.
- ASalazarMX 3y ago
  Twitter is the same. As an exercise in atrition, I've reported dozens of evidently fake accounts pushing the same scam ads (miracle cures and crypto investments mainly), not a single response aside from "We received your report". In my experience, Twitter was more responsive to reports (even if still wanting) before Elon Musk bought it.

mywacaday 3y ago

When the Irish Tánaiste (US VP equivalent) and former Taoiseach (President equivalent) has to go to court and looses when he tries to find out from google who is advertising using his identity you know the whole think is a sham that has to be protected at all costs, https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/courts/2023/12/06/tanaiste-takes-legal-action-against-google-in-bid-to-get-information-about-online-ads-using-his-name/ https://www.irishtimes.com/crime-law/courts/2023/12/06/tanai...

klvino 3y ago
In contrast. A third party created a bogus profile of a global brand and began releasing unfavorable content as though they were the brand. The global brand leveraged their relationship with Google to shutdown the profile (which could be labeled as satirical). Google went on to provide the private account and contact info of the third party posting. It was discovered the third-party was a subcontractor/vendor to the global brand. The global brand shut down all work with the party and had them black-balled in their industry. The Irish gov't wasn't spending enough ad dollars for Google to care.
- smcin 3y ago
  Does either of you have a link, or screenshot? Hard to tell otherwise whether it was a scam ad promoting financial products online, or satire (that sounds dubious), or both.
- tremon 3y ago
  I'm sorry, but this is unparseable to me. Who did what now?
idlephysicist 3y ago
> has to go to court and looses[sic] when he tries to find out from google who is advertising using his identity I believe from the article that you linked that the case is still before the High Court and so he has not lost yet. I wonder would the case have been better made as an instance of identity theft? Also while you are accurate in saying that the Tánaiste is equivalent to the Vice President in U.S. terms, because they are the deputy head of government. The same being true with respect to Taoiseach. I would like to point out that they are not the same positions. While the U.S. President is commander in chief of the U.S. military, the Taoiseach is not the command in chief in Ireland – that falls to the Uachtarán (the President). Tánaiste = Deputy Prime Minister Taoiseach = Prime Minister Uachtarán = President

lp0_on_fire 3y ago

> When ads are the primary source of revenue, there's zero incentive to police the platform And with the promise of impressions (or whatever the equivalent of eyeballs is nowadays) there's little incentive to police the platform for bots.

GuB-42 3y ago

But then, it there is no incentive to police the platform, there should be sexual content in ads, and yet, I don't even remember seeing ads for vibrators or other "soft" adult stuff. I don't remember seeing ads for weapons either. There are scams, but not many obvious counterfeits. To be fair, I block ads, so I don't see many, but the few times I don't have them blocked, they are usually the kind you see on TV: big brand products, blockbuster video games, etc... with the very occasional scam and maybe a few of these fake games. But nothing like what you get on shady sites like porn, torrents, etc... and email spam.

BobaFloutist 3y ago
There are ads for sports betting though, which is absolutely "adult", it's just less likely to trigger culture-war arguments.
- GuB-42 3y ago
  That's actually what I mean, YouTube polices ads based on how controversial it may be, it means they care. Probably because it may hurt their viewership, or drive off other advertisers. And they don't seem to do it to comply with some laws, or making it more kid friendly since, as you said, sports betting gets a pass, even if it is absolutely "adult" and maybe even illegal in some countries. Obviously, scams are illegal too. It just mean they think scams don't give them enough of a bad reputation to police against, which is weird do me, one would think that reputable brands wouldn't want to appear next to scammers.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

There was a time before people called websites "platforms". A time before gigantic websites full of thousands of other people's uploaded files, where the websites are used for surveillance and advertising delivery. The operators of these mega websites, posing as so-called "tech" companies, argue they are providing a valuable "service" to web users, valued at a price of zero dollars. Truly they are only interested in providing a service to advertisers. If advertisers stop paying, the operators will be forced to scale back the surveillance as it's too expensive to host peoples' files for free. If people are paying for their own hosting, like they pay for internet access, then third party websites cannot claim ownership to access logs for peoples' files and other metadata that is useful for advertising.

ChadNauseam 3y ago
If they were only providing a service to the advertisers, why would non-advertisers use their site, and even sit through ads?
- Wool2662 3y ago
  Because they have enough money and data now to just obliterate any kind of serious competition. They only need to keep providing minimal value to actual users. That's why.

givemeethekeys 3y ago

They definitely police the platform. They make sure that anyone who uploads content that threatens ad revenue is appropriately disciplined.

juanpicardo 3y ago

Last time I reported one the replied said that even thought the ad broke their policies, they wouldn't remove it