Google AdSense Banned a Random Webpage About a 32-Year-Old Bill Because It Was About Sexual Abuse (vice.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Earlier this week, an algorithm made an absurd choice. Google AdSense, Google's advertising program that makes up the bulk of the tech giant's advertising revenue, decided that a web page about a decades-old bill about sexual abuse was "adult content," and wasn't allowed to display ads anymore. The page, which is at least six years old and contains strictly legislative information about a bill called the "Child Sexual Abuse and Pornography Act of 1986" on free legislative research and tracking website GovTrack.us, tripped the AdSense algorithm that decides what pages are allowed to run ads. This single, very dry page being flagged as "adult content" is most likely a minor fluke in the AdSense algorithm, but it's a perfect example of how a tiny tweak in the way a platform uses automation to enforce policies can send a ripple through seemingly-unrelated parts of the internet. The page was flagged by Adsense as "policy non-compliant" on Monday, with Google citing the page's "violations" in a summary of the AdSense adult content policy. Here's what Google told GovTrack: "As stated in our program policies, we may not show Google ads on pages with content that is sexually suggestive or intended to sexually arouse. This includes, but is not limited to: pornographic images, videos, or games; sexually gratifying text, images, audio, or video; pages that provide links for or drive traffic to content that is sexually suggestive or intended to sexually arouse." The GovTrack page contains none of these, yet the page still can't run AdSense.

Comments

Jesus

[Daneel Olivaw R.]

bots/algorithms make mistakes, get over it.

Re:Jesus

[Anonymous Coward]

And the appeal was instantly denied, even though any human loading the page would immediately see that the ban was probably a mistake, and could make sure of it in less than a minute.

When algorithms make mistakes, humans need to be there to fix them, and they clearly aren't. That's the problem. Slashdot is going to get a bit overcrowded if the only way to get these mistakes fixed is to get a story posted.

Re:Jesus

[sjames]

That's well understood. The problem is when there is no human oversight to correct the inevitable mistakes that bots make either before or after the fact. Had you actually read TFA, you would see that a request for a review of the page was sent and the prompt (probably also automated) response was NO.

If you're going to let bots make the decisions, "talk to the hand" is not a very good response to questions.

Re:Jesus

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

That's what today's generation puts up with. Me, I can't get over the fact that free speech is decided by unccountable giant megacorps who can't be reined in by government because of their sheer size - not to mention, because they're in bed with said government. I'm always amazed to see what people are willing to accept these days that we weren't...

So yeah, you get over it. I don't. Not that I or people from another era matter nowadays though, mind you: we're old enough that this isn't our world anymore. We're just here for the ride. But the ride gets scarier by the day for us.

Re:Jesus

[Bing Tsher E]

Web pages that make kids ask questions have NO PLACE on the Internet!

*sarcasm*

Re:Jesus

[AHuxley]

Re "businesses are not allowed to restrict speech"

That legal question got asked a few times during the ownership and building of large open spaces in different parts of the USA in past decades.
A large section of private property open to the public. That allowed people to walk around in.
Could free speech for faith and politics topics be allowed to exist in such an open location given the free flow of people?
Courts in some US states did attempt to say yes in some ways, given the free movement of people.
Later it reverted to a much more clear understanding of private property.

Re:Jesus

[umghhh]

It is always easy to say if it is other guy's problem, or?
How about some obscure and unknown to you algorithm decides that you are dead and locks all your accounts? How do you even call help desk (assuming you know who is responsible and that they take calls from minions like you and me) if your mobile contract has been cancelled? There was an article here about guy who whose contract was wrongly marked as terminated by HR system - it took people 3 weeks to reverse from that mistake. Your statement shows that Milgram experiment was correct and showed real attitudes - we do not have guys in black uniforms with some odd emblems on it to tell us what to do and whom to persecute but we have our new algorithmic overlords.

Re:Jesus

[Gavagai80]

If there's no profit in manual review for adwords, then there's no reason for adwords to manually review. You cannot force another company to choose to do business with you and pay you. If they only want to pay you for webpages their algorithm is absolutely certain are safe and they're happy to lose the revenue from the questionable pages, then good for them. If you really must monetize a web page about an old law, you can find another company that'll pay you your 3 cents for it.

The holy trinity

[Hognoxious]

Activists + technical incompetence + blind reliance on technology.

The holy trinity of how to fuck things up.

Google- the new witchfinder general

[Anonymous Coward]

This proves that they (google inc that is) is not fit to manage this sort of thing.
Years ago, a search that I did was blocked because it contained the letters SEX. It wasn't for sex but Middlesex but google decided in its wisdom that this was not allowed.
Middlesx is the name of a county in the UK, the name of a University and a County Cricket Club.

But the Google Puritans will keep on trying to censor our lives.

Re:Google- the new witchfinder general

[Ol Olsoc]

Middlesx is the name of a county in the UK, the name of a University and a County Cricket Club.

I hear they are going to replace "sex" with "gender" in all those places.

Re:Google- the new witchfinder general

[dgatwood]

Wonder how they'll handle the words class, association, etc...

The same way. The Middlegender high school parent teacher rear endociation welcomes the clbutt of 1998 for its 10th anniversary celebration.

I remember seeing an actual BBS that did exactly that (clbutt). The really hilarious thing is that if you try to search for "clbutt" in Google, unless you surround it with quotes to force an exact match, Google's synonym detection automatically uncensors it to "class".

Not seeing ads?

[toonces33]

What's the downside here?

Re:Jesus Is Lord

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like Twitter and Facebooks are Public Forums in at least some circumstances, according to a Federal judge

https://irontrianglepress.com/2018/05/25/presidents-twitter-account-constitutes-public-forum/

Would it be OK if a privately owned toll bridge required drivers to remove all their pro-obama bumper stickers before crossing the bridge? Would it be OK for the bridge company to require people to remove their hateful anti-Islamic bumper stickers from their cars before crossing the privately own bridge?

And, suppose that I'm offended by your subject line due to my personal religious beliefs (I know many sincere Christians would be offended by your use of Jesus's name as an expletive). Do you think would be reasonable if you were censored from participating on Slashdot because of my sensitivity? Why is it OK for you to offend me with your religious hate speech?

Re:Hardly surprising.

[Bing Tsher E]

So all we need to do is figure out how to get the advertisers to bail out on Google?

Hmmm. A worthwhile project there.

No, we won't "get over it"

[MikeRT]

Bots and algorithms are trained by people. The people who manually intervene at Facebook and Google have shown a remarkable consistency in letting their personal views inform their decisions. Case in point: the demonetizing of Prager University by YouTube. The fact that Google did not intervene and fire a segment of the YouTube workforce over that manual decision is a perfectly valid data point to call into question the culture training these models.

Half a century and the war goes on

[Ungrounded Lightning]

This reminds me of The Illustrated Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, back in 1970.

As Wikipedia says:

In 1969, the United States Supreme Court ruled ... that people could view whatever they wished in the privacy of their own homes. In response, the United States Congress funded the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, set up by President Lyndon B. Johnson to study pornography. ... On balance the report found that obscenity and pornography were not important social problems, that there was no evidence that exposure to such material was harmful to individuals, and that current legal and policy initiatives were more likely to create problems than solve them.

The report was resoundingly rejected and denounced by congress.

In response to that, along with continued attempts to, nevertheless, enforce existing, and impose new, anti-pornography laws (and otherwise harass publishers of erotic images), Earl Kemp published an illustrated version of the report, consisting of the report's text but "replete with the sort of photographs the commission examined.".

For distributing this book he was sentenced to a year in prison, and served the federal minimum of three months and one day. (This brings up the question of how one is supposed to have a right to view something it's a crime to provide.)

Nearly half a century later the same sort of attacks on free speech continue on the new Intenet medium. And a handful of copies of the ... Illustrated Report ... are available on Amazon (with the asking price of an unused copy of over half a grand.)