Ask HN: How are so many fake ads allowed on YouTube?

Recently, I have grown to learn that free speech might also include flat out lies that further your own addenda and be about companies not just governments.

All that is to say, that YouTube ads for bogus Amazon strategies and miracle weightloss and hearing plans and now deep fake sponsorships are here because giant companies no longer vet anything and if they did, certain segments of our society will complain that they are being censored.

I got fed animal cruelty a number of times in the early days of shorts. Maybe it thought I was interested from the one I must have lingered on to report it.

Are you sure that's a fake? That seems pretty on brand...

Mr. Beast's shtick is both genius and so dumb to me. Like, the entire premise of his videos is money-money-money.

I mean, of course he's going to get some views with that formula. And yeah, I know he really does have a good understanding of how YT's audience works and how to target it. He's talked about his grinding rise to fame for years now.

But still, he didn't really attack the human mind, he just is playing off of our base impulses. He's the Publisher's Clearing House commercials but for YT. It's not adding anything to the world except base entertainment (a worthy thing in the right circumstances, of course).

I don't know, he found his edge (money! YT!) and has dogged it relentlessly. And that's great for him.

But, I dunno, I feel like his talents are larger than that. That he can make some really good stuff that will last longer than all of us.

> Built atop uBlock Origin, AdNauseam quietly clicks on every blocked ad, registering a visit on ad networks' databases.

[0]: https://adnauseam.io/

And give it to Google? I don't know which is worse.

I personally think they know this about kids being addicted to YouTube too. I see so so so many kids in my life spend hours on end watching Minecraft videos and the likes. I get it, "the parents"!!! However if a child's parents don't have the time to police their kids internet usage, they fall victim to this pray very, very easily.

I have some friends who don't have a lot of money and they both work together running a cafe. The kids basically have to look after themselves because the parents are just too busy working. The kids just spend practically all their free time watching this shit.

Google cannot be so naive.

Unlike the rest of my family, I generally don't watch YouTube, but when I do, it's almost always from something other than a smart TV[0] and I rarely watch videos on my phone[1] (though on my device, I think I'm ad-free there, too).

In a way, it's a lot more of the same. Internet advertising has been a cesspool ... I'm old enough to remember scantily clad women holding X10 devices[2] (usually cameras) in pop-under ads, along with "cyber cash", online casinos and the like. I used to selectively unblock sites that I didn't want to starve of advertising revenue but that stopped when ads became a popular way to deliver malware. Once that became a thing, the gauntlet went down -- I stopped feeling even the slightest bit of guilt about filtering.

I can't say it's (at all) surprising. The scammers have a system where they can produce a large volume of trash at a low cost and make a profit on a few (often naive/elderly/other) poor souls. There's the usual "policing content is orders of magnitude harder than producing it", "lack of sufficient penalty on those producing the ads" combined with lack of sufficient pressure/penalty on those displaying the ads to police them well enough[3]. It's so bad now that you could do exactly what you said -- Google could, literally, run a script to capture the ads from 10 minutes of incognito play, ban them all and would catch, maybe one?, that isn't a law/terms of service violation. Some of these ads make the offers appearing in my spam folder look about as trustworthy.

Add into that "I'm the problem, too" in that rather than "making a lot of noise about this issue", I simply implement ever-more complex ways of eliminating advertising from my life wherever it exists. Due to filtering, I rarely see advertisements that aren't of the "product placement" or physically unavoidable variety (billboards/physical advertising in public spaces, though I'm sure mixed reality will let me wipe those out one day, too[4]).

My kids, however, watch YouTube and similar services far more than they watch traditional streaming/TV and they do so on devices that I haven't taken the time to censor. Much worse, however, is the advertisements included in "the dumb game of the week" installed to one of their devices. It got so bad that I put a blanket family rule of "do not install anything on your device without asking me, first." As I have teenagers, now, about the only way I've been able to enforce that rule is "your device gets malware, it gets a factory reset and I provide no help getting the thing restored." About twice a year they get that hard reminder. It doesn't help much.

[0] Hell, for that matter, I don't watch TikTok or other social media videos at all

[1] A story worthy of another post but modern smart phones seem to do something to the audio that when anything is played out of the speaker that isn't "a ring-tone", it has an aspect to it that sounds like "fingernails on a chalkboard." It bothers me so much that if I'm dealing with a Migraine headache the sound coming out of the speaker results in my symptoms amplifying about as badly as if I looked directly at a bright light source -- it's caused me to spontaneously run to the bathroom to vomit before.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X10_Wireless_Technology

[3] Which, were the penalties big enough would also -- due to "policing content is orders of ma...