AT&T, other U.S. advertisers quit Google, YouTube over extremist

>The decision by major U.S. brands to yank ads, first reported by the Times in the U.K., indicates that an advertiser boycott that began overseas is quickly spreading.

>Google is attempting to quell a growing furor by the British government and major brands in the U.K., and now the U.S., angered over the placement of online ads alongside offensive or extremist content — such as videos by white supremacists or the Islamic State. In response, earlier this week Google that it would pull online ads from controversial content, give brands more control over where their ads appear and would deploy more people to enforce its ad policies.

>So far, Google has not done enough to reassure advertisers, says Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser, who downgraded Google parent company Alphabet's stock on Monday. He had warned the U.K. boycott could have global repercussions for Google.

>More than 250 organizations including the British government, Toyota and McDonald’s have stopped advertising on YouTube in the U.K., according to The Times.

>Wieser says these advertiser defections are just the first shoe to drop in the United States, and other advertisers will likely follow.

>"Google’s response to the matter has been insufficient so far, and it’s not clear that they’ll develop one that is sufficient soon enough to deter others," Wieser said.

>That was the case for Johnson & Johnson, which said Wednesday it had decided to pause all YouTube advertising globally "to ensure our product advertising does not appear on channels that promote offensive content."
...

>"We will continue to take every measure to ensure our brand advertising is consistent with our brand values," the company said in a statement.

>That's easier said than done in the digital age. Brands often don't know where their online ads are running. That's because much of the ad buying in question, programmatic ad buying, is computerized, with machines making the decision on where ads should appear on the Internet, all with very little human oversight.

>That kind of ad buying "has gotten ahead of the advertising industry’s checks-and-balances," Enterprise Holdings spokeswoman Laura Bryant said. The car rental company also pulled its ads from Google and YouTube.

>"There is no doubt there are serious flaws that need to be addressed," Bryant said in an emailed statement. "As a result, we have temporarily halted all YouTube advertising, while executives at Google, YouTube and our own media agencies focus on alleviating these risks and concerns going forward."

>An investigation by The Times in the U.K. found that companies, university and nonprofits had their ads appear on hate websites and YouTube videos created by supporters of terror groups such as the Islamic State. The ads on popular videos likely generated significant income for extremists, according to the newspaper.

>For example, an ad on YouTube for the new Mercedes E-Class ran next to an ISIL video praising jihad that has been viewed more than 115,000 times, according to the Times. Luxury holiday company Sandals Resorts had an ad run next to a video for al-Shabaab, the East African jihadist group affiliated with al- Qaeda, the investigation found. After The Times informed Google, the company removed some of the videos. Companies that have pulled their ads from Google over the controversy include Volkswagen and L'Oreal SA.
...

>Advertisers who announced they had pulled their business on Wednesday said they were working with Google to resolve the situation.

>GSK, the world's sixth-largest pharmaceutical company, said the placement of its brand next to extremist content "is completely unacceptable to us."

>But, GSK said it was encouraged by the steps Google has taken in recent days, and said it would continue to work with Google "to make further progress in developing adequate safeguards to ensure that advertisers are not placed in this position."

>Wieser says Google must adopt a zero tolerance policy for putting brands in "unsafe environments when they place ads."

>With the changes announced late Monday, advertisers on YouTube and on Google's ad system that places ads across the web will be able to exclude websites and videos that are "potentially objectionable," will have greater latitude to decide where they want their ads to appear and will have more "visibility" on where their ads are running.

>"We know advertisers don’t want their ads next to content that doesn’t align with their values," Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, wrote in a blog post about the changes. "So starting today, we’re taking a tougher stance on hateful, offensive and derogatory content."

>Why is this such a significant issue? "Brand safety" has emerged as possibly the biggest issue facing the advertising industry, Wieser says. For large marketers, even one ad placed next to extremist content can cause harm to a brand, he said.

>Google reviews content flagged by users. Four hundred hours of video is uploaded every minute to YouTube, Google says, making it tough to police. Some 98% of content flagged on YouTube is reviewed within 24 hours, Google says.

Alright that's pretty funny...

So this is how censorship infrastructure gets put down now? Advertising companies?

I don't really see a reason for a boycott of Google; that's quite silly when it merely indexes websites and provides a medium for user-generated content. It's not as though they can feasibly guarantee that everything they index or that users upload will always be sanitary to the standards of advertisers.

If advertisers don't like the videos their ads appear next to, as long as Google is trying to perfect it's measures, the ethical burden is on advertisers to specify to their exacting standards which content they shouldn't appear next to.

It's not going to be possible to have Google or YouTube where advertisers approach 100% certainty that the algorithm that decides where their ads appear will always find just the right content. That's a technical matter, not one of ethics or human error.

>>124517
Google is making revenue off those ads even when jamal and ackbars hate messages were the target of the viewer. On top of that you dont know if these shitskins are recieving any portion of the monetization. (Probably are in most cases) googles profit motive demands the situation swept under a rug until the fire is out of control. Unsurprised by any of this

>>124516
Capitalism finds a solution. ...... fuck to many hours left at work to drink

two birds one stone

Why are advertisers so picky about what sort of content their ads appear next to?

>>124565
controlling their image
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_relations

>>124520
Those are some serious allegations that Google didn't mind hateful content (as though that's limited to ackbars online) as long as they profited. Technically, Google indirectly profits from indexing stormfront too. But that's different from saying they wanted that audience, especially when they have options for flagging said videos and their algorithms attempt to filter those uploads.
I trust you have some evidence if you're claiming to the contrary.

>>124520
Google to my knowledge doesn't allow users to monetize single videos. Creators need to be generating a stream of content that's consistently reaching a relatively sizeable audience.
Some fag uploading a beheading and it getting 1M views doesn't mean Google will partner with them.

Well i guess we are going to get another crackdown on stuff on youtube again

>>124610
>another crackdown

You people seriously cannot read.

Google is trying to make its changes entirely on the side of the ad's distribution, not the on the availability of content itself. Google has a history of not censoring either content or availability (i.e. search results) unless being forced to by law (Scientology, DMCA -- they run chillingeffects.org which documents all takedown notices).

>>124643
>Google has a history of not censoring either content or availability (i.e. search results) unless being forced to by law
what a joke.

>>124859
They removed the original MEMEME! video for being too sexual and Bestiality sites from search results, but have terrorist propaganda and sexual "art" on youtube all the time. Reddit is also insufferable.

It's all too progressive for my mind.

>>124941
Are you morally outraged?

>>124941
>Reddit is also insufferable.
What's wrong with Reddit? They are like a liberal version of 4chan, but with more censorship.

>>125172
Here is a good example of why it is as he claims. Only liberal morons would want to close down a subreddit that basically puts all the nigger haters in a small box voluntarily and flush them out into the mainstream subs all because the people hate the wrong thing. Now, there is just that passive seething racism run amok all over the site. They chose thought policing over just engagement.

That Daryl Davis guy had it right. "If you are talking to me you are not fighting me."

Once reddit chose not to engage and ban a whole sub because of "hate speech", i knew the site was never going to truly represent all people and creeds any longer. Just nerfball liberal safe space.

>>125172
>What's wrong with Reddit?
I can answer this
>They are like a liberal version of 4chan, but with more censorship.

>>125250
Fuck that is hilarious mate.

>>124946
Yeah, a little, it's quite obvious that what is censored is selected based on views and not just removed because it's wrong. Of course, I am not really surprised because Sites like Reddit don't just actively censor information, they also actively manipulate it.

>>125172
The place is a miserable hive of corporate interests and admin cronyism. Most forums descend into the latter inevitably, but Reddit has grown so large IRL morons will actually pay attention nowadays.

They care about nothing but their precious ad revenue, and thus they engage in censorship so as to not scare away the corporate interests that fund them in the first place. People pretend like the subreddit's deletion was the start of this bullshit, but it's a long history.

The userbase is filled with cretins who presume debate is a game of pointing out logical fallacies, the block function only serves to create further isolated bubbles of bullshit delusion that come clattering down when reality marches in. They fill their subreddits with "consensus" regurgitated from the latest Google Scholar sources with all ingenuity or inventive thought shut out in favor of endless, mindless virtue signalling to the end of time. It is the ultimate stagnation for the mind, the bubble that protects but does not teach.

>>124941

>They removed the original MEMEME! video for being too sexual

they removed it from youtube because it shows sexualized nudity, which is against the TOS.

>and Bestiality sites from search results

because beastiality is illegal because animals cannot consent.

>>125272

your moral outrage is misplaced. Youtube is not a platform of pure free speech, of course, because it disallows porn. I'm all for people expressing whatever ideas they want including nudism but I understand that western society and culture is not in a place where pornography can be considered acceptable viewing for everyone.

Look at the search results for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr..
One of the first results leads to a white nationalist website that's rather unflattering. That's the kind of exposure to a wide variety of opinions, some offensive, that's really important, whether or not the ideas are right or wrong by any measure, but that Google allows.

>>124941
>terrorist propaganda
Propaganda is a sort of speech
Lies are a sort of speech
You're simultaneously complaining about censorship and demanding censorship.

>>125323
There is a huge difference between subreddits that advocate for terrorism and/or are recruiting grounds and subreddits that simply make racist cartoons.

>>125314
>because beastiality is illegal because animals cannot consent.

In America, it's up to the state and in Canada sucking dogs dicks is a national sport.

My statements are really more about what reddit/Google is being selective about censoring rather than the censoring itself. Sure, they censor bad things and all the more rights to them, but hey, they don't censor legit illegal things.

>>124941
i dont know about that stuff,
but what made my really not trust google is when they wiped out search results for pedowood.

pedowood was a topic on /pol/ discussing all the rich, influential and corrupt pedos pedos in the past few decades.
about a month in, searching "pedowood" on google would result in 0 results.

seems like they have undone it now, but for a year or so that i checked only a few newly added pages referencing it would show up with all original results nuked.
not enough to get me to trust them again though.

here it is if youre interested.
http://pastebin.com/jEHkAhZu

>>125713
They wiped out pedowood because it's tinfoil bullshit and people like you who keep it going are literally crazy.

There is so much more evidence that contradicts Pedowood than proves it true. Cathy O'Brien is a crazy person (she has Multiple Personalty Disorder) who says President Gerald Ford and country music star Conway Twitty raped her together in a WashingtonDC hotel room. Gullible people still pay her for her books on the subject. The Franklin Case relies on the testimony of convicted, admitted con artists and happened so long ago that the people involved are dying off now. It's hardly some international conspiracy, more like a weak con game to sell books at tinfoil conventions.

>>125713
Before /pol/ it was a /tv/ thing. Largely brought to attention by Dan 'not a child molester' Shenider