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It shouldn't be an ad network's job to adjudicate truth, especially given Google's monopolistic position. They should stick to selling and reselling eyeballs and clicks, and regulating things directly material to that, e.g. deceitful ad placement.
This article is about deceptive publishers pretending to be well-known sites, not about anybody trying to be an arbiter of truth.
It specifically names propaganda sites. The problem though is that the definition of propaganda should not lie in the hands of google alone. Never hand over shackles that could one day be used on you.
You misread "impersonating news sites became an addition following the rapid rise of fake news, or propaganda sites."
So they should be banned from providing their customers (the people buying ads) assurances about the sorts of content their ads will appear next to? Seems like that forces them to leave a lot of value on the table.
It doesn't sound like ad purchasers have much of a choice here.
I'd love to see the list of banned publishers.
Is that going to include Trump's Press Secretary?
I'm not sure I want Google to tell me what's fake and what's not fake.

This also means they're transitioning from being a neutral part to being curators.

This also means they're transitioning from being a neutral part to being curators.

So you think Google shows you a list of sites sorted alphabetically by URL or something?

Google is famous specifically for PageRank, which is curation.

But it is not manual curation, at least not officially. That's why the algorithm is so (in)famous, because it's an algorithm.
Why not show a statement like they do with copyright removal requests and indicate to the user that there are flagged results in the search query, but give the option to view the results anyway? At least in that respect, they don't re-enforce the notion that news is being censored at the request of some third party or that Google is taking the vigilante route to culling fake news.
I feel like the title is fake news and should be banned. They are removing publishers from their ad network not baned from Google
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