Google To Revamp Policies, Hire Staff After UK Ad Scandal (reuters.com)

Google vowed on Tuesday to police its websites better by ramping up staff numbers and overhauling its policies after several companies deserted the internet giant for failing to keep their adverts off hate-filled videos. From a report on Reuters: Google has found itself at the center of a British storm in recent days after major companies from supermarkets to banks and consumer groups pulled their adverts from its YouTube site after they appeared alongside videos carrying homophobic and anti-Semitic messages. Alphabet's Google launched a review of the problem on Friday, apologized on Monday and said on Tuesday it had revamped its policies to give advertisers more control.

Comments

Why is it a scandal?

[Chrisq]

Surely people know that google inserts ads to videos and can't watch them all? Would it be a scandal if someone wrote racist graffiti on a bill-board? Would the bill-board provider be responsible?

Re:Why is it a scandal?

[gnick]

Would it be a scandal if someone wrote racist graffiti on a bill-board?

This is more like putting a bill-board up next to racist graffiti because you blindly assumed the graffiti was something your customer wanted to be associated with. If your business model is to advertise next to graffiti, you should have some idea about its nature.

Wow

[whitlocktj]

Much ado about nothing.

When will sites who run them be responsible

[houghi]

I will take /. as an example. It loads ads of different size and loads them in two times and so slow that I often click on an add by accident. No, I am unable to install an adblocker. Yes, I know it is stupid my company allows me to surf /. and does not block ads, but why would they? This leads me to my second point.

When there are ads with some hacking in it, websites say they are not responsible. I think they should be. I am not saying that the ad syndicates should not be responsible. I say that if you host content YOU should be responsible as well. And that will include using an Iframe that pulls content from an unknown source.