Google Bans 200 Publishers From Its Ad Network (recode.net)

Since it passed a new policy against fake news, Google has banned 200 publishers from its AdSense network, an ad placement service that automatically serves text and display ads on participating sites based on its audience. "The ban was part of an update to an existing policy that prohibits sites that mislead users with their content," reports Recode. From the report: Not all 200 publishers were swept up as part of the effort to root out fake news sites. Publishers were banned in November and December and included sites that impersonate real news organizations through shortened top-level domains, according to Google's 2016 "bad ads" report, normally released at the beginning of each year. So-called fake news publishers will sometimes take advantage of ".co" domains by appearing similar to legitimate news sites that would normally end in ".com." Google declined to provide a listing of the banned sites. Separately, the annual report on violations of advertising policy also included data on ads removed by Google. The company reported that in 2016 it took down 1.7 billion ads for violations, compared to 780 million in 2015. Google attributes the increase in ad removals to a combination of advertiser behavior and improvements in technology to detect offending ads. Also among those the removed ads were what Google calls "tabloid cloakers." These advertisers run what look like links to news headlines, but when the user clicks, an ad for a product such as a weight loss supplement pops up. Google suspended 1,300 accounts engaged in tabloid cloaking in 2016.

Comments

CNN?

[frovingslosh]

But did they get the worst fake news sites like CNN, NBC and Huffington Post? How about Faux News?

Re:CNN?

[ClickOnThis]

But did they get the worst fake news sites like CNN, NBC and Huffington Post? How about Faux News?

To be sure, all of these sites occasionally (or even frequently) show bias in their reporting. But none of them are blatant purveyors of fake news.

Fake news is a deliberate fiction, written with the intent to deceive, frighten, or anger the reader. It is not the same as news written with a bias, or even news reported in good faith, but with errors.

Re:CNN?

[Anonymous Coward]

>The difference is trivial

Do you honestly believe that the pussy grabber being accused of sexual abuse is the same as an easily disproved hoax?

Just so you know, saying that because they both CNN and Bretbart are biased means that they are both equally disingenuous is laughable.

Re:CNN?

[DogDude]

That's bullshit. Those aren't remotely similar.

And your bullshit about "every source being biased" is more bullshit that you pulled out of your ass. There's good journalism, and there's bad. Breitbart is most definitely, bad journalism, if it can be called journalism at all. CNN isn't the best, but they're a hell of a lot better than Breitbart.

Re:CNN?

[Tim the Gecko]

"Does waterboarding work? Seven questions about the controversial interrogation technique" More fear mongering anyone?

Here's Mr Trump saying "absolutely I feel it works" a few hours ago - http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...

Fears that it will be used again are legitimate.

Re:CNN?

[frovingslosh]

Bad journalism = I don't agree with what they say.

Re:CNN?

[Anonymous Coward]

Both stories are bullshit, you partisan idiot. Neither candidate is a rapist or pedophile. The fact that it's become the norm to accuse both of the major candidates of the vilest of crimes just shows how ugly political discourse has become. And the fact that even "reputable" news sources routinely parrot this garbage also shows how broken the press is in the U.S. too.

Re:CNN?

[DRJlaw]

Both stories are bullshit, you partisan idiot.

Indeed. One story is merely backed by a voice recording of the perpetrator, who quickly gave up upon even denying the words and instead argued that he was being hypothetical.

Who could possibly believe such bullshit... surely not I. /s

Re:CNN?

[Sartr]

Everyone who disagrees with us Tolerant Liberals is a racist bigot Hitler monster. How do you fucking idiots still not learn your lesson after being Trumped so hard?

Re:CNN?

[AthanasiusKircher]

Fake news is a deliberate fiction, written with the intent to deceive, frighten, or anger the reader. It is not the same as news written with a bias, or even news reported in good faith, but with errors.

THIS. The word "fake" has undergone a redefinition (mostly by conservatives, but now also used by liberals) in the past couple months. In normal everyday English in other circcircumstances, the word "fake" has a clear meaning: something deliberately (and knowingly) fabricated to pretend to be true/accurate/genuine when it's not. Hence "fake ID" or "fake Rolex" or whatever. When you show a bouncer a "fake ID" to try to get into a bar, it doesn't mean you accidentally showed them someone else's ID or unintentionally tried to pass off an invalid one or something. It means you deliberately tried to pass off an ID you knew was manufactured as false.

The fake news folks have themselves fought back by trying to redefine the English word "fake" to mean "biased" or "unintentionally erroneous". But that's NOT what the word means. They're trying to distract you from the actual fabricated "news" out there... Which is a real problem.

Re:CNN?

[silentcoder]

Cussing out a federal agency or not is not a measurement of degree of bias. It is merely indicative of a key difference between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives tend to respect authority, it's considered a key value to them. Liberals tend to question and be critical of authority.

There are a number of such key value differences between conservatives and liberals - and strong science to back up that concept.
Conservatives tend to value in-group loyalty extremely highly. Hence conservatives tend to be anti-immigrant and generally don't mix much with people of different cultures or values or ethnicities. They say things like "take care of our own first".
Liberals on the other hand tend to attach almost no value whatsoever to in-group loyalty, it's just not a value they care about. So they'll form their social groups across any and all lines, they'll care equally for a sick child of a neighbour or the sick child of an immigrant - they don't see a difference.

Conservatives are, in general, far more anxious than liberals - they simply are more afraid (so the whole "snowflake" and "safe space" thing is doubly-stupid) - and you can see that in the way so many conservative arguments are framed around "the threat". Conservatives argue we can't save millions of refugee lives because a few of the refugees may be terrorist - but even if we deem these the most astoundingly wonderfully effective terrorists in history, and assume they can kill thousands - that doesn't make any sense to a liberal. The threat is tiny, so they don't focus on it - and besides the outcome even if the threat happens isn't that bad to them - since they don't value in-group loyalty that much the cannot consider "a thousand of our own" to be a greater loss than "millions of them". To a liberal - there is no "ours" or "them".

https://www.ted.com/talks/jona...

These are differences in fundamental morality. Note - not in LEVEL of morality. Both groups are highly moral - and indeed both believe the other to be entirely IMMORAL - but that's because the moral values they subscribe to are completely different.
So yeah, cussing out the FBI is not a big deal for a liberal - if they did something WTF-worthy then they deserve to get WTF'd. To a conservative it goes against that deep respect for authority moral - and so seems like a huge deal. Breitbart wouldn't run that because their readership would be offended. This is key to understanding the birther movement. Why was it so important to them to try and prove Obama was not a legitimate president - why would they cling to such an obvious piece of bullshit ? Because resisting the greatest authority in the land, despising him as much as they wanted to - well that goes against their morality, the only way to square the circle was to convince themselves his authority was not legitimate. You can see the inverse of the same process happening right now as Trump flat-out lies about crowd-sizes and TV-ratings, and denies having lost the popular vote on utterly spurious grounds. Why would he CARE ? He's president, the highest authority in the land. He won the election and he was inaugurated - why wouldn't he just be happy - why make such a big deal of those things ? Because he helped plant the seed that respect for authority only applies to legitimate authority, and anything that calls even the slightest question over the legitimacy of his authority (and certainly over the degree of mandate he got from voters) is perceived as a very real threat to him. He cannot imagine that anybody would obey him in anything if they think his authority is not absolutely 100% legitimate and mandated. Which is doubly quixotic fear because frankly the people who are resisting him couldn't care less. They would be resisting just as much if he HAD won the popular vote. They care about WHAT he is doing - they question authority, they don't respect it by default and how legitimate it is doesn't enter into the equation at all. The only reason they keep bringing it up is because of how nicely it gets under his skin.

So no, the cussing is entirely unrelated to the degree of bias - it's merely indicative of the moral differences between the target audiences.

Re:CNN?

[silentcoder]

No, we reserve it for sources who don't follow standard editorial practise, where MOST stories are flagrant lies that can easily be disproven. Nobody is saying mainstream media never prints wrong stories, never makes mistake and doesn't sometimes just plain lie - but it's rare because of a strong construct of editorial practises that rule out the majority of fuckups before they get to print.
We reserve "fake news" for sources that don't follow those practises and print anything that appeals to their political agenda.

Look how many flagrant lies were made up about Clinton. Even Pizzagate. Now where is the lies about Trump ? He DID say those things to Billy Bush - we HEARD him on the tape. We have PROOF.
And that DOES make the women who accused him of it more believable.

We didn't NEED to make up fake news about Donald Trump - he was quite capable of saying and doing things all by himself that ought to make any decent person drop out of a race !

Fake news is hilarious

[Okian Warrior]

But did they get the worst fake news sites like CNN, NBC and Huffington Post? How about Faux News?

If you have an eye for humor, you can find it in lots of interesting places. "Fake news" is one of these hilarious situations that just makes me laugh.

The whole thing started right after the election. One of the reasons Hillary lost is because of "fake news", and the articles of the time specifically talked about smaller web sites, about how more mainstream sites couldn't get the word out because some small upstart would post an article saying the exact opposite, and "how can the everyday person tell the difference"?

It was specifically aimed at Breitbart and Drudge report.

Then about 2 weeks later Google and Facebook announced plans to "fix" fake news, by implementing algorithms to suppress the less mainstream reporting and promote real, honest-to-goodness news sites as search results.

And people started talking about how easy it was to snooker a right-wing website into printing anything, but they could never do that to the left-ish sites because someone would point out the facts and it would all go down in flames. (Note: Actual article covered on Slashdot said exactly that.)

And... they're off.

People started taking pot-shots at the MSM with fake news tweets and facebook posts and YouTube videos, and we saw all sorts of crap being shown as real news on MSM media sites. Such as CNN running that they inadvertently ran pornography for a half hour during Thanksgiving, then apologizing for doing that. (Hint: the original incident didn't happen, CNN got pranked and doesn't even check out stories that involve themselves.)

This culminated in the Tump "golden showers" news report widely circulated by BuzzFeed and CNN and looked like an obvious fake from the outset (from tone, style, and other aspects), and would have been easy to check if they had taken the time to do so. It was also outrageously insulting and viciously timed.

BuzzFeed and CNN did not walk this back or apologize - they doubled down, writing how they felt that it was important to post the information so that the American public could come to their own conclusion. Contrast with the "how can the public tell the difference", which was the original argument against "fake news".

Trump then burned CNN bigly at a press conference (he hadn't yet been been sworn in as POTUS). Dressed them down harshly in front of the world audience, and had to harshly reprimand them as if they were children for all their shouting out of turn, demands for answers out of turn, and demands to be called on.

It was glorious! The net had a field day, everyone had a good hard laugh at the disgrace of CNN.

So now everyone has calmed down, we've had our laugh, and things are back to normal, right?

The MSM has a new term "alternative facts". It seems "fake news" didn't work out so well for them, they have to reset and restart, we're back to the beginning.

We're at the point now where we were just after the election. Trump has started setting up the MSM for another fall with his comment about inauguration numbers - that'll get the ball rolling. The MSM won't be able to let this go, the terms "alternative facts" will grow large in the public eye in the next couple of weeks.

And let's see how that goes for them. It 'sorta looks like Trump has already set them up for the big fail, giving them all the rope they need to be a laughingstock once more.

But hey, I might be wrong. It's not as if Trump knows how to manupilate the media or anything, right?

They're too smart to fall for that a second time.

Re:Fake news is hilarious

[No Longer an AC]

The MSM has a new term "alternative facts".

And you know who gave them that term?

It was laughable to hear Conway actually use that. It's as if she's admitting to living in some sort of alternate reality.