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Google Allowed Advertisers To Target 'Jewish Parasite,' 'Black People Ruin Everything' (buzzfeed.com)
Alex Kantrowitz, reporting for BuzzFeed News: Google, the world's biggest advertising platform, allows advertisers to specifically target ads to people typing racist and bigoted terms into its search bar, BuzzFeed News has discovered. Not only that, Google will suggest additional racist and bigoted terms once you type some into its ad buying tool. Type "White people ruin," as a potential advertising keyword into Google's ad platform, and Google will suggest you run ads next to searches including "black people ruin neighborhoods." Type "Why do Jews ruin everything," and Google will suggest you run ads next to searches including "the evil jew" and "jewish control of banks." BuzzFeed News ran an ad campaign targeted to all these keywords and others this week. The ads went live and were visible when we searched for the keywords we'd selected. Google's ad buying platform tracked the ad views. Following our inquiry, Google disabled every keyword in this ad campaign save one -- an exact match for "blacks destroy everything," is still eligible. Google told BuzzFeed News that just because a phrase is eligible does not guarantee an ad campaign will run against it. A total of 17 ad impressions were served before the keywords were disabled.
Deja vu, except for the company name.
I'm not seeing why this is a problem. You're not going to eliminate racism by hiding it. It's not like a confederate statue staring you in the face, you have to go looking for racist garbage for you to find it on Google search and if you do find some racist garbage you can get rid of it fairly easy with their reporting tools.
People want information and advertisers want information. You can find perfectly legal porn sites and the like and they can advertise. I'm just not seeing the social dilemma. It's not like their getting links to fake pharmacies that can sell you knock off Viagra that could be potentially dangerous and lacks quality control (which they had an issue with before and fixed). I'm a big proponent of people being accepting and part of that is being accepting of people who I think have horrible world view points. As long as it doesn't harm me people can do what they like, unless it is BuzzFeed news. That's literally Hitler. #ICan'tEven
Anyone can put together any combination of words that adds up to a custom-made definition of "hate". Furthermore, what about other languages? Should Google hire people to cover all languages and spend their days thinking of hateful sentences to ban?
If only 17 ads were served during X numbers of hours or days or weeks before the sentence was banned (and probably served to the BuzzFeed employees who did the research), then they are not really addressing any problem. It seems like a fake news.
It is likely, though, that BuzzFeed in their market research identified hateful leftists and are actively marketing to them using well crafted ad-words.
"Pit bulls dangerous" allowed? How about ads targeting "Crooked Hillary"? Or even worse, what if I want to market a product to members of the gay community? Can I use the word "Queer"?
1. Google's primary income is from their ad platform. ...
2. Targeting is what makes their ad platform competitive.
3. Hate speech is protected speech in the US.
4. Profit?
Are we going to get the same story every day until we run out of different platforms you can put a search term into?
Actually, I think this should be considered as a feature, not a bug.
If you are, say, the Jewish Antidefamation League, people who put in the search term "Jews ruin everything" and "evil Jews" and "Jewish control of banks" into Google search are exactly the people you want to serve advertising intended to change public opinion.
Ages ago, before torrents and automated enforcement of the DMCA, one could find direct-download "warez," "keygens," and "cracks" easily through major search engines.
One day, I was searching for a particular software crack so that I could try it without borrowing a key dongle, and I got a notice from Google directing me to a drug rehabilitation hotline. I'd never even considered that people might use Google to look for crack cocaine, but, thanks to the naiveté of keyword-matching, there was the opportunity to get help for an addiction I thankfully did not have.
I'm sure all sorts of hateful organizations paid Google for the opportunity to sell swag to bigots. I'm sure Google spent their money just as easily as they spent money from people buying access to nicer keywords.
Want to burn a bigot in the ass? Let it come out that every dime spent on buying access to "Jewish Parasite" and "Black People Ruin Everything" went to the ADL and NAACP. Give organizations like the ADL and NAACP access to those keywords gratis. Offer alternatives to hate as easily as alternatives to drugs.
Google missed an opportunity to, relatively cheaply, buy a huge PR win and help overcome hate.
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
Did they set it up specifically that way, or is there some algorithm that picked up on dreadful people chatting and try to sell to them?
Everybody remembers Tay, right? She started off a simple chatbot and wound up the grand wizard of the kkk by the end of the day.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Google told BuzzFeed News that just because a phrase is eligible does not guarantee an ad campaign will run against it.
You'd think a company as rich as Google could afford a competent spokesperson who wouldn't say really stupid shit like that.
unless you got a solution to eliminate prejudices.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
It's not really a dupe, as it involves entirely different companies.
this all does seem a little bit like fake news
What about this makes you think the stories are lies?
... the day they start engaging in significant censorship is the day they become too powerful and get slapped with common carrier status and broken up as a monopoly.
traditional American culture
What exactly is this? One of our founding principles is placing the individual above the group or the state. And to protect the rights of any like-minded individuals to assemble and practice their own culture. That said, where exactly is the definition of this "traditional culture"?
Have gnu, will travel.
In Soviet Union self identification in the form of "I am Russian" or "I am Georgian" or "I am Ukrainian" and etc was considered as imperial Chauvinisme or Nazism and the person was put under surveillance from secret service. We are living in free country and having free speech and right of expression. The problem should be resolved from other end, via counter propaganda. Prohibition does not solve the problem, it only let those groups to proliferate their ideas faster.
It's not really a dupe, as it involves entirely different companies.
I just realized Google and Facebook might as well be the same company...
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Free speech includes ignorant speech, idiotic ideas and even speech designed to flame the fan of hatred. Trying to limit free speech is expensive, troublesome and almost a total failure. The centuries old fight against pornography is a great example. Today we have more access to a huge variety in porn than ever before. About the only item that has been beaten down is child porn simply because almost all people hate child molesters. and even when we put the sick types in prison or other facility we spend a huge sum getting the job done. It is a legitimate question to ask what would happen if we let the child porn industry run full throttle and use the money that we would have used squashing child porn and put that sum into cancer or heart disease cures? How many lives would be saved? how many children would actually be harmed if we change policies. Can we even get dollar amounts on the money used to stop child porn? My guess it is in the billions per year. It is similar to looking at the money used to fight prostitution. Being that some people only get by in life as sexual providers and would do far worse if they could not rent their bodies to the public and the money spent for cops, jails and the like for these people does legal restraint do anything more than cause great harm to the public. When the enemy is at the beach head and one needs tanks and guns and troops just how does spending money fighting porn and hooking count for anything if you can't afford a winning military?
The English language has allowed people to voice hate speech and conspire to conduct terror. But worry not, the truth ministry is working on New English which will rectify these shortcomings.
> Google could easily build a filter that could stop 90% or more of these phrases. They will never stop 100%, but they could easily do way better.
If we made a list of objectionable phrases, we may find that Google DID block 90% of them. Without checking, I can't agree with "they could do way better" - we don't know how well they did. We only know that somebody was able to come up with a few phrases that weren't blocked.
> But should they? Is it really their role be society's ideological and moral gatekeepers?
That is indeed a very good question. It gets real interesting when you consider the types of racist things Al Sharpton says, or the things many black comedians say.
The Dataminers.
better yet... Miners of The Data, where "The Data" is the personal information of a large fraction of people on the planet.
This discussion is about how people can target their ads, not about totally removing a site from Google's index, or indeed removing it from the web completely.
Suppose you are selling unique cases for Raspberry Pi. You wouldn't want to show that ad to just anybody and everybody at random, that would be wasteful. Instead, you'd want to advertise Pi cases to people who search for "Raspberry Pi", "Pi case", "Pi model B", etc.
When you advertise through Google, you can show your ads to likely buyers by selecting phrases they search for. The author of the article set his ass to run when people search for "Jewish parasite". Google'sâ server let him type that in and run ads when people search for that.