We Discovered Google’s Social Justice Blocklist for YouTube Ad Placements

https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2021/04/09/how-we-discovered-googles-social-justice-blocklist-for-youtube-ad-placements

by danso • 5 years ago

55 46 5 years ago

themarkup.org

formerly_proven• 5 years ago

"Black power" being blocked but "white power" not is pretty grim.

abstractbarista• 5 years ago

All I want is equality; either block both, or block neither. As a user, I can guarantee I hate all ads equally, but also put up with all equally, because I'm too cheap to pay.

MereInterest5• 5 years ago

"White power" is a phrase used to enshrine social inequality and promote violence against minorities. "Black power" is a phrase used to stand against social inequality and to resist that violence. These are not equivalent terms. One is the rallying call of violent aggression and pogroms, while the other is a defense against that. Painting the two phrases as equivalent ignores the social context behind each of them.

tekromancr• 5 years ago

This is a bad take.

"White power" is a call for supremacy. "Black power" is a call for equity and solidarity.

Conflating the two by saying that blocking both or allowing both would be "equality" is.. Mind you, I've only been awake for half an hour; but it's definitely the worst take I have read so far today.

unanswered• 5 years ago

"Black power" is associated with a political ideology shared by tens of millions of people across the US. "White power" is associated with a political ideology shared by dozens of people across the US.

If we discover that phrases associated with Cthulhu cults and flying spaghetti monster adherents are likewise not blocked, it's probably not because Google is secretly promoting those religions.

But with the publication of this article "white power" no doubt increases in popularity as an ad targeting term, so Google has to add it. There's absolutely nothing surprising or nefarious going on here.

bigth• 5 years ago

I read the whole article and still don't know what they discovered. Highly abused and unlikely to profitable or legit search terms are banned...? What was the discovery?

falcolas• 5 years ago

“Black Lives Matter” is blocked, “All Lives Matter” is not. That’s one thing I took from this.

I also took that their implementation of such keywords are poorly implemented - a token implementation at best.

noxer2• 5 years ago

So the one that excludes several races and is the name of an extremist organization is blocked and the other not surprised pikachu

MereInterest5• 5 years ago

The asymmetry is the bigger part. Advertising allows for community growth by pointing to more resources and I formation. Essentially, "If you support X, here is a group working on the topic of X.". When this is allowed for X="white power" but forbidden for X="black lives matter", that's a huge disparity. That means ads cannot be used to recruit against police violence, but can be used to recruit for white supremacy.

CivBase5• 5 years ago

It's very easy to make a list like this look asymmetrical when your article cherry picks the most outrage-inducing results from your test and disregards any results that don't fit your narrative.

codethief2• 5 years ago

Honestly, I don't understand what the issue is. I actually appreciate it that YouTube seems to suppress ads that target political topics (even if the blocklist is still incomplete / unbalanced). We already have enough political ads on Facebook; we don't need them on YouTube, too.

minikites• 5 years ago

Weird how it only seems to affect one side of political spectrum though. I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

krapp2• 5 years ago

It's not weird if you consider that Google's primary motive is to make their platform attractive to advertisers and first-party rightsholders, and thus maximize revenue, rather than to spread social justice activism. It's always been the case that left-wing, LGBT and other non-traditionally mainstream content is considered a greater risk for advertisers than right-wing content.

suifbwish4• 5 years ago

I really hope that’s sarcasm.

dan-robertson• 5 years ago

Isn’t the solution to reducing political advertising to ban political ads like Twitter did, rather than binning targeting ads to political topics? Most political ads seem to targeted towards general locations anyway.

busterarm• 5 years ago

Banning political ads on twitter is like sticking your finger in a collapsed dam.

99% of twitter usage is journalists covering politics and political activism. The other vertical on Twitter is celebrities and they mostly have switched over to Instagram content.

rozab• 5 years ago

Is being gay political?

krapp2• 5 years ago

Unfortunately, to many people it is. Or at least being openly gay.

danso4• 5 years ago

I think the issue is that the policy is unevenly applied, and Google's response to it was to obfuscate what little transparency there is in the process:

Further, all social justice keywords on list we used that included the word Muslim were blocked for ad placement searches, including such innocuous phrases as “Muslim fashion” and “Muslim parenting.” Their counterparts, “Christian fashion” and “Christian parenting,” were not blocked when we checked in November—nor were the anti-Muslim hate phrases “White sharia” and “civilization jihad.”

zepto• 5 years ago

The problem is that we don’t know if it is unevenly applied because we don’t know how often those unblocked terms are actually used.

The article does a bunch of interesting investigation and quantification but the only point it actually makes is based purely on innuendo.

pocket_cheese• 5 years ago

There are a lot of terms they mentioned that aren't political though. Blocking terms like "Muslim Fashion" doesn't seem defensible.

actually appreciate it that YouTube seems to suppress ads that target political topics

I think that youtube should be suppressing shitty adds, not potentially decisive content. The way they are currently handling the situation signals to creators from marginalized groups that they should not talk about substantive issues if they want to get paid.

This is disheartening as it is ironic because Google (and literally every other mega corporation) tries to posture themselves as being socially conscious, but as soon as people want to talk about injustice or inequality, they are essentially soft-deplatformed.

even if the blocklist is still incomplete

I might be a little cynical, but I feel like it is complete because it's working the way they want it to. The one-sidedness of the blacklist doesn't tell me that google is discriminatory. It tells me that the companies buying ads are discriminatory, and google changes their policies to make them happy. Google's tacit acceptance of prejudice tells me everything I need to know about their principals.

codethief2• 5 years ago

The one-sidedness of the blacklist doesn't tell me that google is discriminatory. It tells me that the companies buying ads are discriminatory,

Yes, that's my preliminary conclusion, too.

and google changes their policies to make them happy.

Or Google changes its policies to prevent abuse, and abuse just so happened to occur more frequently with some search terms than with others.

CivBase5• 5 years ago

I dislike Google as much as anyone else on HN, but this article is reaching so far I'm afraid it might pull a muscle. They just cherry pick a bunch of terms that were and were not on some random blacklist in a misguided attempt to paint Google as some kind of secret white supremacist sympathizer. This article is trash.

eric4smith2• 5 years ago

It's a private corporation. They can do what they like.

And unfortunately, the alternatives, like BitChute, etc are rife with far right, far left, nazi and other stuff.

I really tried to use some of them. Really.

But even checking some of my favorite content creators, it's kind of jarring to see people in the comments using the nazi symbol as avatars and openly racist language (on both sides) being used.

The taste was really bad in my mouth just spending a few minutes over there. Couldn't deal. Had to leave and never to return. Never even tried to load it in my browser again.

Have they tried to use any moderation so far? I would love to try it again if they do.

Something to be said for even the imperfect moderation on YouTube.

swebs2• 5 years ago

How about something like PeerTube that can be self hosted?

eric4smith2• 5 years ago

I will try! Thanks for the rec.

MereInterest5• 5 years ago

I can't remember where I first heard it, but there was a good description of a lot of the new social networks popping up. If you make a community whose founding virtue is "no witch hunts", you shouldn't be surprised when it is primarily used by witches, regardless of the prevalence of witches in general society.

swebs2• 5 years ago

important racial justice terms—including Black Lives Matter, Black power, and Black Muslim
“White lives matter,” “White power,” “White nationalists,” and other retorts and hate phrases.

Am I the only one who thinks modern identity politics is completely fucked up?

emerged• 5 years ago

Everyone who is both intelligent and has a soul agrees with you.

snurfer• 5 years ago

Be sure you get to the penultimate paragraph:

"After we approached Google, the company also blocked all the hate phrases that we pointed out were in conflict with the social and racial justice ad blocks. Google began blocking innocuous phrases with other religious words during our reporting, after we began conducting interviews in which we revealed our findings to third parties."

frob2• 5 years ago

I find it very interesting that Google will voice support for the Black Lives Matter movement, but it won't allow others who support BLM to monetize their YouTube content. Google loudly and proudly supports their LGBTQ+ employees and marches in pride parades every year, but won't allow advertisers to support LBGTQ+ channels. Google loudly denounced Trump's Muslim-ban but thinks advertising for "Muslim fashion" might cause PR issues so blocks it.

These are not the actions of a company taking a stand for what's right; these are the actions of a company that's always playing the PR game for the sake of their bottom line. As someone who has worked there before, Facebook is just as two-faced in the exact same way.

suifbwish4• 5 years ago

This article reads like it was written by a 9th grader. Google is trying to discourage any racially biased media from their platform (YES black power and white power are equally racist). Here’s a little trick. If you see a phrase with the word “black” in it, in your mind substitute it for “white”. If the new phrase sounds racist to you, it means it was racist before you substituted as well, and the fact that you didn’t think so means you have racial bias that you aren’t even questioning. Is the whole world insane? Logic is not that difficult. Seriously, we let the dumbest stuff divide us as a species.

danso4• 5 years ago

So you agree that Google removing divisive categories is better for them and their users – but you're angry that people did the work and found that this policy is unevenly applied? Why is it not worth asking why "Muslim" was blacklisted but not "Christian", "Jewish", or "Buddhist"?

The religious descriptions “Jewish,” “Christian,” and “Buddhist” were also blocked as standalone words. But when we combined them with the word “fashion,” only “Muslim fashion,” one of the terms suggested by advocates, was blocked. “Jewish fashion,” “Christian fashion,” and “Buddhist fashion” were not blocked for advertising when we conducted our study, showing the blanket ban on “Muslim” in combination with any other word did not extend to other religions.

suifbwish4• 5 years ago

You should ask the AI why it decided those terms were worse than others

noxer2• 5 years ago

This is how it should work. But reality is different. Have a look at Wikipedia Black pride/White pride for example. One is celebrating culture the other is racist/white supremacist slogan.

DorianSinDeep• 5 years ago

Appreciate the work done by the journalists to show these discrepancies to Google. They obviously fixed it as one would expect.

It is worth noting though that this discrepancy would have been much easier to spot by someone on the other side of the aisle. Maybe Google should put a small rotating committee of paid employees to audit these blocklists. It seems a small cost in exchange for avoiding way too much PR drama.

dtrain2017• 5 years ago

The story here is that YouTube does not care about content moderation. YouTube has a blacklist but the blacklist is missing the most obvious terms like "White Power' and 'Great Replacement'. Someone at the company is in charge of maintaining the blacklist but was negligent. Why?

Also, if searches for words associated with White supremacist culture returned videos then there are other ways to access them, why doesn't Google simply take them down if they are already labelled?

We Discovered Google’s Social Justice Blocklist for YouTube Ad Placements

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