The ironic thing is that this creates the very problem it seeks to solve...
If advertisers have no control over which content their ads appear near then they can legitimately claim, when criticised, that they are unable to pick and choose.
By giving advertisers control, when criticised, the critics can use that same control in order to pressure advertisers to limit ads to inoffensive content only (which, frankly, is almost nothing anymore).
But with the direction "being offended" has taken (i.e. someone on twitter will take offense to anything, and they feel they have a legitimate right to never feel offended) it won't be long before most content is inaccessible.
Advertisers have always wanted to control the content that their ads appear next to because it determines the efficacy of the ad. If your wholesome, family brand starts showing up on porn or ISIS sites, it doesn't matter that you can say "oh that's out of our control," your brand has already been damaged. Also, if you cost structure is CPM, you probably didn't want to waste an impression on that page.
> (i.e. someone on twitter will take offense to anything, and they feel they have a legitimate right to never feel offended)
Your post was stronger without this straw man. Do you think a real person would say that they have a legitimate right to never feel offended? I don't think so.
That part of it is easy to mitigate by the auction process. I.e., the mean efficacy of ad placement is reflected in the price of the winning bid due to the usual market forces.
The less quantifiable part of it, "my brand must never appear alongside X," cannot be dealt with in the auction because the recall has to be perfect and it's not feasible to guess how the advertiser would decide all the tricky cases.
The auction process only solves that problem if advertisers know what the adjacent content is and use that information to bid less or not bid on it. At that point, we're back to the status quo of advertisers policing content.
While you might be able to automate the process somewhat with ads that aim for direct conversions, it's still extremely difficult to automatically measure the effectiveness of brand advertising.
It's because the people doing the responding share the ideological leanings of the people doing the complaining.
When the same social circles are both in PR/HR and the offended class they will consider the same things valid criticism and may go as far as flying in the face of 90% of the quiet consumers of the product's interests.
But with the direction "being offended" has taken (i.e. someone on twitter will take offense to anything, and they feel they have a legitimate right to never feel offended) it won't be long before most content is inaccessible.
I dunno. I find Nazis, cat torture videos and pro-ISIS propaganda offensive. But you are right, clearly free speech must be protected at all costs and even made profitable, and clearly it being remove from YouTube and no longer subsidized by major brands advertising would be a huge set back for it.
Maybe people could go to NaziCatTorturers.com and pay to see it or something.
I'm not sure why you were downvoted, hyperbole maybe. But you raise a very valid point. People are using a "slippery slope" argument to justify supermarkets indirectly funding terrorist groups by way of sponsored propaganda videos. Advertisers should absolutely have some choice over how and where their adverts are shown.
I said the same thing when reddit changed it's mind about "free speech" - once you announce you're banning 'the bad stuff' it implies that what remains is good
What's the real deal with "restricted mode"? I don't think they care too much about people having to sign up to be able to watch a video. Do restricted videos show no ads? I can understand certain businesses not wanting to see their ads displayed next to some BDSM gay parade, LGTBI++ propaganda, beheadings or other extreme violence, etc. In that case, if they show no ads, why host them at all, if they can't cover the bandwidth they consume?
In theory restricted mode gives some control to parents who might be happy to let their children watch Etho playing minecraft, but not RoosterTeeth Let's Play playing minecraft.
In practice, and everyone knows this, filters fucking suck and either have terrible false negatives and don't block awful content, or terrible false positives and block stuff that shouldn't be blocked, or both.
That's nothing to do with this, which is that advertisers don't want their ads next to people saying rape is ok.
I don't think those restrictions are applied automatically. I believe they are set when a video get lots of reports. Maybe it only takes a few reports to restrict the videos, or maybe a human has to evaluate them before flipping the switch. As much as filters suck (I agree with you), I think a few false positives are worth it if we don't show a kid a video of some idiot saying rape is ok.
But I don't use youtube much, so I might be wrong... that's why I ask. :)
I think instead of these corps virtue signalling they should look at it this way: a person might be watching jihadist content and descending to a bad place, but then they see your sweet ass Mercedes ad and are like "fuck this, I eschew my extremist tendencies and vow to join the Western consumeristic rat race so that maybe one day I will have my own Merc and hot model friends inside of it! USA!!" I mean standard lane assist technology? Thats way cooler than using a shitty cell phone to blow up your clunky suicide vest.
I know stuff like this is usually noise, but this 4chan[0] image is super relevant to this comment. If you weren't specifically referencing this, color me impressed.
I get the argument that corporations ought to take responsibility for where their money goes, but I feel like this is a bit similar to if I buy a cookie and the cookie baker buys a house and the former owner of the house buys a gun and kills some people - is it reasonable to hold me partly responsible for contributing to it? Should we want that level of control in our lives? What's the average degrees of Kevin Bacon between someone and an unscrupulous person? Do we reserve this kind of judgement for felons or white collar criminals as well?
From what I understand of online targeted advertising is that it's a way for corporations to target the viewer, as opposed to the video they are watching. I have a diverse array of interests and watch a whole bunch of videos on YouTube on a variety of subjects. I am not defined by a single video or channel.
As per my understanding, I am the commodity. If I am a history buff and I want to watch an Adolf Hitler speech for academic reasons or just curiosity, by casting aspersions on the channel or the video, you are effectively casting aspersions on me! Is the value of my time tainted because of one video or channel?
In my experience, when I look at something on Amazon, I invariably see an ad for it later on on some other site. It's clear to me that this is a connection between Amazon and me via the ad network. It puzzles me as to why there seems to be this outdated mentality about how this works, which incorrectly associates the ad with the page instead of the user.
The point of all of this is social control by corporations and their owners and managers over the culture. Corporations hold most of the money and they only give it to people who distribute money according to what the owners and managers of the corporations feel is worthy because they do what the corporations want or more specifically what their owners and managers want. That locks out any sub-culture outside of social control and relegates them to lower/poorer levels of society, economically. That might control bad things, but it might also censor things which are not mainstream global corporate culture.
I think (correct me if I'm wrong) that the distasteful publishers were receiving money from the adverts. So the headlines were technically correct to say "Marks & Spencer gives money to homophobic terrorists". There is a link in Google's advertising model between the page and the advert - the video is the placeholder on which the publisher is placing its advert.
I accept that the solution is difficult, but Google designed and benefits enormously from this system, so it's reasonable to expect them to do something about it.
I think there's two factors at work here. Number one, the ad buyers have a brand image they wish to control, and therefore they have an interest in ensuring that their brand is not associated with content they think would tarnish their image. Even if every ad-viewer consciously knew that the ads did not imply endorsement of the content, there are subconscious factors to consider (factors which form the basic premise of a huge percentage of corporate advertising--eg that positive subconscious associations with brand imagery is one of the purposes of advertising).
Second, this is a (needed) power play on the part of ad buyers. Google has growing control over huge swaths of online and mobile advertising. Ad buyers need to push back, questioning the value of this sort of advertising and demanding more control over where their ads are displayed. Why should they trust Google to do the job of deciding where their ads belong for them? Google has proven time and again that they trust their own AI and machine learning tools far more than they should. And the longer they wait, the worse it's going to get.
In reality, they don't really want to clamp down since more controls reduce ad inventory and add to their costs. (As Gadfly colleague Shira Ovide points out, the tech giants' biggest enemy is hubris.)
That seems forced. I understand it's a link to another article that they wanted to include somehow, but it's specifically not hubris if they have a valid reason, and as just stated it's because it reduces inventory and adds to their costs.
In the finance category, so many posts are robo written now. If you Google just about any ticker symbol you get a very unnatural reading post about its recent movement. Just meaningless analysis that say nothing and recites some ratios. I spend about 2 seconds on those pages when researching a company.
YouTube also just had a big pushback from the LGBTQ+ community because they quietly instituted a feature that (unevenly) blocked videos having anything to do with being LGBTQ+ as "objectionable."
They've walked it back with "our algorithm went overboard," but I wonder when people are gonna stop buying this excuse. If the automated system you put in place serves extremist ads or deems a whole class of people as objectionable, that's on you.
It's google's platform and they can do what they want, and I have little issue blocking actual racists. But, banning hate speech (correctly) stopped any ad revenue from going to Tommy Sotomayor, a black man who grew up in the poor south and who talks about black issues. The problem: He's very critical of black people/culture, issues he personally faced growing up.
The algorithm works in this instance. His speech is hate speech by most definitions of the word. But that's the main problem. Hate speech includes reasonable hate!
If I had it my way, reasonable discussion about a culture should never be blocked. Even if it's hateful. Hate should not be banned, otherwise people will vent their hate in worse ways.
How can you say "He's very critical of black people" in tht wording with a straight face, after acknowledging that he is black too? The point is that there's a difference between saying "I hate this person and the thousands like her who behaving this way" and "I hate black people because they behave this way".
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 72.9 ms ] threadIf advertisers have no control over which content their ads appear near then they can legitimately claim, when criticised, that they are unable to pick and choose.
By giving advertisers control, when criticised, the critics can use that same control in order to pressure advertisers to limit ads to inoffensive content only (which, frankly, is almost nothing anymore).
But with the direction "being offended" has taken (i.e. someone on twitter will take offense to anything, and they feel they have a legitimate right to never feel offended) it won't be long before most content is inaccessible.
> (i.e. someone on twitter will take offense to anything, and they feel they have a legitimate right to never feel offended)
Your post was stronger without this straw man. Do you think a real person would say that they have a legitimate right to never feel offended? I don't think so.
That part of it is easy to mitigate by the auction process. I.e., the mean efficacy of ad placement is reflected in the price of the winning bid due to the usual market forces.
The less quantifiable part of it, "my brand must never appear alongside X," cannot be dealt with in the auction because the recall has to be perfect and it's not feasible to guess how the advertiser would decide all the tricky cases.
While you might be able to automate the process somewhat with ads that aim for direct conversions, it's still extremely difficult to automatically measure the effectiveness of brand advertising.
Advertisers will respond to the masses, not the most outraged hecklers.
Twitter seems to be proving that wrong these days.
When the same social circles are both in PR/HR and the offended class they will consider the same things valid criticism and may go as far as flying in the face of 90% of the quiet consumers of the product's interests.
I dunno. I find Nazis, cat torture videos and pro-ISIS propaganda offensive. But you are right, clearly free speech must be protected at all costs and even made profitable, and clearly it being remove from YouTube and no longer subsidized by major brands advertising would be a huge set back for it.
Maybe people could go to NaziCatTorturers.com and pay to see it or something.
In practice, and everyone knows this, filters fucking suck and either have terrible false negatives and don't block awful content, or terrible false positives and block stuff that shouldn't be blocked, or both.
That's nothing to do with this, which is that advertisers don't want their ads next to people saying rape is ok.
I don't think those restrictions are applied automatically. I believe they are set when a video get lots of reports. Maybe it only takes a few reports to restrict the videos, or maybe a human has to evaluate them before flipping the switch. As much as filters suck (I agree with you), I think a few false positives are worth it if we don't show a kid a video of some idiot saying rape is ok.
But I don't use youtube much, so I might be wrong... that's why I ask. :)
[0]: https://imgur.com/r/4chan/dgGvgKF
From what I understand of online targeted advertising is that it's a way for corporations to target the viewer, as opposed to the video they are watching. I have a diverse array of interests and watch a whole bunch of videos on YouTube on a variety of subjects. I am not defined by a single video or channel.
As per my understanding, I am the commodity. If I am a history buff and I want to watch an Adolf Hitler speech for academic reasons or just curiosity, by casting aspersions on the channel or the video, you are effectively casting aspersions on me! Is the value of my time tainted because of one video or channel?
In my experience, when I look at something on Amazon, I invariably see an ad for it later on on some other site. It's clear to me that this is a connection between Amazon and me via the ad network. It puzzles me as to why there seems to be this outdated mentality about how this works, which incorrectly associates the ad with the page instead of the user.
I accept that the solution is difficult, but Google designed and benefits enormously from this system, so it's reasonable to expect them to do something about it.
Second, this is a (needed) power play on the part of ad buyers. Google has growing control over huge swaths of online and mobile advertising. Ad buyers need to push back, questioning the value of this sort of advertising and demanding more control over where their ads are displayed. Why should they trust Google to do the job of deciding where their ads belong for them? Google has proven time and again that they trust their own AI and machine learning tools far more than they should. And the longer they wait, the worse it's going to get.
That seems forced. I understand it's a link to another article that they wanted to include somehow, but it's specifically not hubris if they have a valid reason, and as just stated it's because it reduces inventory and adds to their costs.
http://teneightymagazine.com/2017/03/19/youtubes-restricted-...
They've walked it back with "our algorithm went overboard," but I wonder when people are gonna stop buying this excuse. If the automated system you put in place serves extremist ads or deems a whole class of people as objectionable, that's on you.
The algorithm works in this instance. His speech is hate speech by most definitions of the word. But that's the main problem. Hate speech includes reasonable hate!
If I had it my way, reasonable discussion about a culture should never be blocked. Even if it's hateful. Hate should not be banned, otherwise people will vent their hate in worse ways.
Here's his channel if you're curious: https://www.youtube.com/user/sotomayortv2
Example video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycYDUCGi7no1