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Google Bans Ads For Essay-Writing Services
llamapalooza writes "Google announced that it will ban essay writing firms from advertising on their site. (The prevalence of cheating on campuses has been discussed here before.) While universities have welcomed the move, the affected firms are claiming it will 'punish legitimate businesses.' Google has specifically banned 'academic paper-writing services and the sale of pre-written essays, theses, and dissertations,' which now join other items on the banned list such as tobacco, drugs, weapons, and prostitution."
which now join other items on the banned list such as tobacco, drugs, weapons, and prostitution."
Depends on the drug
Anyway, who really cares who Google accepts for advertising - its what they index that really matters.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Nope, I like my dictionaries to have the word 'fuck' in them, my phone books to list escort agencies, and my search engines to not set moral standards.
I'm aware that this is only on the paid-for part of the business. I still don't like it. If it's legal, they should allow it. It calls into question whether they're putting their morality into the rest of their business.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
if I could have found those services.
"I'll create my own search engine, with blackjack and hookers" and essay writers.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
which now join other items on the banned list such as tobacco, drugs, weapons, and prostitution.
Essay writing is just a simpler form of prostitution. You know the old saying "Prose before Hos".
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
These are legitimate businesses, but that does not mean that Google has to display their ads.
Google can choose to display or not to display any ads they want. The supreme court has found many times that the right to not speak is equally as important as freedom of speech.
While I've never cheated. It's hard enough being an honest college student nowdays. Searching the web for research on topics and having that constant reminder pop up in your face. You can bypass 30 hours of research and writing with 20 bucks. Pisses me off to no end.
I admire the business plan behind it even when they make my life hell with thier grade curve changing essays. They must make a fortune.
As someone who is less than 48 hours away from a completed thesis Ph.D. thesis and a little over a week away from my defense, there is only one thing I have to say about this.
It's about damn time.
I hate to see that these services even exist.
I understand the cheating will always go on, at all levels of academics. The practice isn't against any laws, but it is nice to see Google not condoning something legal but flat out wrong.
-V-
Who can decide a priori? Nobody.
-Sartre
Who bothers to sell essays and dissertations when half the spam I get offers me a PhD outright for $200!
Has anyone tried to get ad sense to offer them a degree?
Actually, it's "Don't be evil" from their CoC. And I imagine their decision to refuse this type of advertising is, in their opinion, the lesser of two evils.
Where I live it is perfectly legal to advertise prostitution. I can see that google will take the attitude that it is illegal most places so it is safer for them to ban it. But there is a line to be drawn here. Essay writing services seem to be mainly an academic issue. Lots of people would never have heard about it. Perhaps they should ban advertising for game hacks.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Thats the thing, it's so easy to pay someone else to do the writing. You can even upload your own writings and get paid for them. I think the smartest thing a teacher can do in this day and age is upload all thier own work and get paid for it while they continue to flunk students for cheating.
> which now join other items on the banned list such as tobacco, drugs, weapons, and prostitution." i had always wondered why google adds never advertised anything i wanted
First of all, I don't think selling papers is _illegal_, though. Unethical, yes, but then lots of unethical things pass for normal and legal business these days. (And it was even worse in the past.) So _if_ your implication is, basically, "they may be legitimate, but they're not legal", I'll have to disaggree there. They're against university rules, but AFAIK not against any state or federal laws. If they were illegal, you wouldn't need Google to do that, you could just forward those links to the police.
Second, legitimate is even trickier. Where do you draw the line? Technically speaking, anything legal _is_ a legitimate business. If you don't want it done, just pass a law to outlaw it.
And the business side pops up all the time (e.g, "but it creates employment!") when debating whether or not to make something illegal. It sure popped up in the spam and telemarketting debates, for example, all the way to the highest level. So basically when deciding whether it's legal or not, some MPs/congressmen/whatever-you-have, already considered the business side of it, and whether or not they want businesses doing that. E.g., whether the (lack of) ethics of it outweigh the employment created, tax income, and/or bribes from that lobby. In a way they already decided if that kind of business is legitimate or not.
Employment vs inflation is a constant concern since the Great Depression, when basically suddenly supply outstripped aggregate demand. (Yes, Say's Law does still apply, but "supply creates its own demand" only by lowering prices, and in the Great Depression suddenly the only point where you could actually sell all that stuff was below the production costs.) This became even worse when most industry moved offshore. Now we need even less people producing stuff. What do you do with the rest? Leave them unemployed, like in the 19'th century? Well, that also lowers the money they can spend to buy stuff, and that-a-way lies the downwards spiral that led to the Great Depression in the first place.
So nowadays governments actually get to see that employment stays roughly where they want it, and create some extra aggregate demand. (Deficit spending, pork barrel, social security, etc.) It works too, since we no longer have the economic crisis cycles that plagued most of the 19'th century and the first part of the 20'th century. Back then it was considered _normal_ that the industry goes through bankruptcy cycles and rises from the ashes based on demanding even longer work hours and lower salaries.
In a nutshell, a government's job is to see to it that you encourage (or at least don't discourage too much) people to create more jobs that don't actually produce something. Pretend to manage each other, create whole castes of marketters just trying to steal customers from each other, or do all sorts of convenience services to each other. And chip in a little to make it all keep working. Deserved or undeserved, ethical or unethical, as long as the negative impact is small enough, it doesn't matter. It matters that unemployment doesn't get out of hand. Because noone wants another Great Depression.
That's why even when debating something as annoying as telemarketting, the question just _has_ to pop up, basically, "how many jobs _are_ we nuking in the process? and can the rest of the economy absorb those?" You don't want to be the paladin in shiny armour that saved people from all evils... at the expense of causing the economy to collapse.
At any rate, that's why a lot of unproductive and even mildly unethical stuff is allowed to exist. In fact, encouraged to exist.
If you think that such companies are crossing the line into outright harmful, well, just lobby your lawmakers to outlaw it.
But, yeah, I'll aggree that Google is free to choose the companies it does business with.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Truly useful services like prostitution, pot, warez and essay writing need no advertisement. Potential customers will actively look for them in regular Google search results and offline through references from friends. It's the useless services like "free" credit reports that need to spend money on ads in order to rip off clueless people.
The list of banned adds reflect what Google's AdSense clients, the people who put Google adds on their web pages, are willing to put up with. Many people would be unhappy to see adds for prostitution, guns or tobacco on their web pages, and choose another advertising partner if Google let those through. Losing those partners would hurt more than losing the advertisement customers for the listed products.
Now homework cheating services are on that list.
So this is a case where maximizing profit also happens to be "do no evil" (depending on your definition of evil).
Google apparently still allows ads for Diploma mills. Usually they claim that they examine your "life experience", and then grant you a diploma based on what you already know. In practice, they just sell you pieces of paper without checking, and you can then use the diploma to pretend to other people you have taken a real university degree, i.e. fraud.
For example a reporter was able to buy a degree in aerospace engineering, a field he knew nothing about, from Ashwood University. Ashwood University is deceptively named to be similar to Ashford University.
But if you search for "Ashwood University" in Google you get plenty of ads. As well as the Wikipedia article which document the fact that the operation is fraudulent. The Wikipedia article is vandalized regularly by people trying to edit out the well-documented criticism. The vandals are probably the university owners or degree holders.
I have sent an email to Google some time ago, saying that they were advertising for fraud. But my email had no lasting effect, obviously.
Actually, now that you mention it, I'd rather have more prostitution ads than some of the other scams I'm bombarded with.
E.g., you almost can't go to a page that's even remotely game/gold/whatever related, without getting powerlevelling and gold farming ads nowadays. Not only that kind of cheating actively disrupts the game for everyone else, but in most cases nowadays it's a scam. There's a whole class of keylogging trojans and viruses nowadays that simply steal someone's login data. Then the scammer logs in, sells everything that guy's characters have (leaving them literally naked), then transfer the money to the scammer's characters to be advertised as "buy gold for low prices!" Even on Google.
Now I don't want to go into the whole debate of whether virtual goods should be treated as real ones, but it's:
A) just actively ruining someone's gaming experience, and
B) in a dumb destructive way at that. The price for selling those items at the vendor is often 1 or 2 orders of magnitude lower than their normal in-game value. It's like burning someone's house down to sell the ashes. That dumb and destructive.
Even not treating those as "property", if you put in the balance the joy of someone who bought 100 gold in a game, vs the grief of someone who lost items worth 2000 gold for that, it's a bad trade all around. It's ruining someone's _months_ of time "investment" to let someone else feel rich and powerful for maybe a couple of hours until they blow it on some stupidity at the auction house. They haven't worked much for that gold, so don't expect them to put much value on it. They'll maybe buy a weapon they'll use for 2 days until they buy more gold for the next one.
C) maybe more important, it's rewarding and encouraging activities that are destructive and predatory IRL too, not only in some virtual imaginary game world. The viruses and keyloggers are very real, and often used for other nefarious purposes too, like harvesting bank accounts, credit card numbers, as spam bots, as DDOS bots, etc. It's activities which are already bad as it is, and sadly too rewarding as it is. I don't think anyone actually wants to encourage them some more.
So, frankly, if I look at A, B and C, I appreciate a hard working prostitute a lot more. She's just providing a service for people who want it, and selling only her work and time, not actively ruining anyone else's day for something to sell.
Or I constantly see google ads for crackpot conspiracies, crackpot young-earth/flat-earth creationism, scams, frauds, phishing schemes, spyware, etc. Even Google itself had that piece of news about how many people clicked on a "Is your PC virus-free? Click here to get it virused" ad. It was on Slashdot too.
Meh. I'll take prostitution ads instead, please. No, I still wouldn't buy sex, but, hey, I'm not buying all the other crap advertised at me either. So gimme some nicer ads at least.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of ads at all. But getting rid of them completely is, obviously, not an option. So if I _have_ to see ads, let's have some good old fashioned porn and prostitution ads instead of all that crap, please.
They're more honest than half the rest of advertising too. I'm going to barf if I see one more ad for snake oil that's supposed to solve all sorts of problems that don't even exist, and with made up testimonials at that. And idiot PHBs actually believing that crap.
At least with a prostitute you can know realistically what you can get, and how it would work. Human anatomy only allows for so much variation, you know, and there's only so much that plastic surgery can do. (Admittedly, that's a lot.) You can't claim to reduce TCO 10 times, increase ROI ten times, allow untrained monkeys to write enterprise-class programs in 21 days, solve world hunger, cure cancer, and bring global enlightenment. Everyone just knows that even a kilo of silicone implants won't do that
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I am soooooo offended by your suggestion. I DEMAND AN APOLOGY!!!
Essay-writing services can be used for non-immoral purposes outside what many think their target audience is. But ignoring this, I have the following to say.
Banning the advertisements isn't going to solve the issue of plagiarism. In fact, it could compound the problem by pushing it underground. If someone is motivated to cheat, they're probably going to cheat regardless of whether they see an advertisement on Google, or whether they have to hunt underground for a service. Afterall, is Google banning search results?
For the third year of my UK bachelor's degree I was once extremely pressed for time. Personal circumstances, that the essay material was quite peripheral to the core of the study and that I was edging in at the highest grading tier (1st) already led me to try an essay writing service.
I used an essay service that let you specify your desired grade, level (bachelor's degree, masters or PhD, though not which year of bachelor's degree) required turnaround (standard 1 week, express 48h delivered by midnight on the 2nd day, express 24h delivered by midnight on the next day) and word limit. You could also specify sources that you needed to have referenced.
I picked the 24h, but specified in the comment box that I was happy with 48h delivery but would like to pay the higher amount in order to ensure that they took proper care in writing. I also provided a couple of references we had been given.
The essay I got back after 20h was 15% below the recommended word limit and literally crap. No logical progression, shoddy grammar (who writes short sentences starting with 'So'?) and just a bunch of bullet points all pasted together that didn't lead to any conclusion. One of the sources had not been used with the explanation that 'I was unable to find the source you quote for which I should not be held liable', and the others only in extremely generalised ways that could pretty much apply to any article on the subject.
The only recourse was that I could 'return it along with a list of desired changes for the author to make', but given that the same person would write it I didn't really see the point. I spent the last day rewriting paragraph by paragraph ~£500 ($1000) lighter and was really so embarassed over the result that I didn't ask for feedback on it.
-AC
...one of the ads seen at the top of this story:
Custom Essay Writing
Professionally written essays and term papers delivered on time
CustomEssayWriting.com
irony meet your elder cousin...
7-8-9-10-0
To me it seems a little pointless to be banning advertising Essay writing services, especially when the google search is for "Essay writing services". Even without the paid ads, the search engine should still provide a list of businesses. Surely they are only taking a moral stance of not profiting from this kind of service rather than really inhibiting people.
Cheers, Chris
Depends on the juridiction.
And here in Switzerland, it is illegal to advertise for it.
A drug company can advertise its brand name (As in "Here in Mepha we make generics and thus are cheaper than concurrence !")
A drug company may indirectly infer that it does produces drugs against some problem ("Having sexual troubles ? You shoul talk about them with your doctor ! this message is brought to you by Pfitzer")
But a drug company CAN'T advertise its products to the general population ("Eat Prozac ! It's will make your life happier !")
Also, addiction to medical drugs is on the rise in developed countries and is starting to de-throne the classical usage of illegal drugs. Both with people getting addicted on naturally addicting drugs like sleeping medication or pain killers, and people who get "psychologically addicted to comfort pills" (eating anti depressant and viagra like candy, even if those don't necessarily cause physical addiction).
I'm not a hippie saying that drugs bring more problems than they solve, or that we shall go back to a society with no chemical remedies (That would be suicidal : I'm a doctor).
I'm just saying that general public should be a little bit more informed about those problems and less exposed to pharmaceutical marketing (which anyway is what cost the most for a drug company, and not the R&D as they are complaining anytime someone tries to lift drugs patents to help developing countries).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Personally, being a friend of someone who writes viruses for a living, I think there are three negatives to making virus writing illegal:
Forgive me if I don't find your defence of people whose entire business model revolves around deception terribly compelling!
Incidentally, this kind of service is hardly victimless. For every person who goes out into the world and gets a good job on the basis of a qualification they didn't earn, someone who did earn that qualification loses out. That almost certainly damages both people who did earn the qualification and the people who would hire them.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
We've had a similar problem on some technical Usenet groups where I help out, teaching beginners various programming-related subjects. Some posts are obviously asking us to do their homework. Most are obviously genuine questions. A few are harder to classify.
Our benchmark in the case of ambiguity is whether the person asking the question has demonstrated some effort of their own. For example, if a person posted some source code showing how far they'd got already, and then explained what it seemed to be doing, what they wanted it to do, and what the difference was, then generally plenty of people would come along and either point out their mistake or suggest a way forward. If the question was just stated without any accompanying code, then typically the poster would be invited to show what they've got already and identify where their problem is.
For similar reasons, we rarely post "final" code suitable for handing in unmodified, although one or two posters have been known to be deliberately evil to an obvious homework question, posting a simple-looking and technically correct answer that relied on advanced techniques no beginner would know. I imagine a few lazy students have handed those in without even reading them properly, and then faced some embarrassing questions about how the programs worked... <wicked grin>
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
[...] which now join other items on the banned list such as tobacco, drugs, weapons, and prostitution.
http://www.google.com/search?q=grenades - turns up an ad reading:
"Grenades
Looking for
grenades? Save!
www.shoppingpage.us"
(Now, I know that they're not actually selling grenades, but rather have a pile of ads based off of a list of generic words/terms, but it's pretty funny. "Landmines" used to turn up an Ebay ad reading "Looking for landmines?")
Fluoxetin the ative stuff in Prozac, as well as other "selective seretonie-reuptake inhibitors", has a complex (and slow) dynamics.
Depression, in an oversimplified way, can be said to have 2 interesting characteristics : it makes one very negative. But it also removes most will power (the patient becomes apathic and doesn't do anything apart maybe occasionally complaining).
Again in an oversimplified way, SSRI-class drugs will have a faster effect on the apathy than on the mood. Thus there's a time-window during which the patient starts to act much, but still hates everything including himself and has a very negative self-image. As now, unlikely what was before, he *has* the willpower and can act more easily, there's a risk he may commit suicide.
Thus good follow-up is necessary. It's not a therapy someone attempts on his own decision, alone at home, without seeing a doctor.
This is one of the main reason I think drug advertising should be banned : drugs are complex stuff, and it should be the doctor's job to decide when to use what. Not the decision of the patient and people shouldn't be massively brainwashed by the drug corporation's propaganda. The patient's decision is only to ask for help and then to accept or decline what a doctor proposes.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]