Yeah the whole story didn't make sense, it really would have been an unprecedented act from Google and I don't see them setting that precedent. Ironically, it shows how NBC... lied to us? The joke kind of writes itself at this point.
Yeah, okay this is definitely weird. I sort of get banning outright fake news and Zerohedge is a very shady website, sure.But the Federalist's article is not fake news. You can disagree with it, but it's part of a debate on the media coverage of the protests. People have always complained about media being unfair and biaised. Is it now promoting hate and misinformation to criticize the media? Or do we have to just trust NBC to judge if the media did adequately cover violence or not?
At this point we have moved from arguing for taking down false stories to taking down criticism in... A month? That's a little bit insane and scary
And I get that advertisers don't want to run their ads on controversial stories, but the Federalist is all about politics and it is to be expected that ads running there will be... Political, no?
All being reasonably sensible and being aware and in agreement of the idea that big corporations indeed influence public and political opinions, directly or indirectly, what can someone do about it?
Chomsky always says, "Organize!". Organization requires mass involvement. Mass involvement comes when there are masses with same opinions. How would one go about finding masses with same opinions when the mainstream platforms won't allow such opinions to be posted in the first place that they oppose?
However, advertisers will generally not want their ads served beside false and inflammatory content. Google Ads is, ultimately, a platform for advertisers, and they've always avoided certain subjects. If you're an advertiser who _does_ want your ads alongside porn, conspiracy theories, warez, multilevel marketing scams, and so forth, there are platforms out there, but Google Ads probably isn't your best venue.
Or, indeed, more esoteric stuff. For instance, if you want your ads to appear alongside the sale of tigers or fake sneakers, you should look to another network. Google's one of the stricter ones.
In this case, per the article, the issue was the comments. You can imagine how abhorrent the comments on The Federalist are likely to be.
YouTube definitely gets plenty of horrible comments as well. An important question is how well each site polices comments to remove ones that violate the rules.
Google Ads exists to serve the interests of Google alone, and content restrictions are reactive to the threat of losing money.
That's why YouTube operated as a "haven for pedophiles" for years. Ads right next to livestreamed abuse on YouTube? No problem! Harmless edgy right-wing doomsday blog? Rule violation.
People are perfectly free to comment on or criticize relationships or lack of relationships occurring within the "free market".
Google's dominant position in the online advertising industry is allowing them to influence political opinions and they are doing so in favor of mainstream media. That seems worth discussing to me.
They're actually trying to use their monopoly to control U.S. elections. This is far worse than any monopolist has ever been accused of in the past: this is not going to help their case if they're actually facing a forced AT&T-style break-up.
I'm pretty sure that's Zerohedge, and as I said Zerohedge is full of lunatics that was already kicked off the ad network anyways. The Federalist didn't say the protests are fake, i think. If anything, there seems to be tons of articles about the protests and how they show the "hypocrisy of the left" when it comes to the coronovirus lockdowns. That implies that they aren't fake, and I can't find anything on the Federalist arguing anything like that.
Would you mind pointing out where the lie(s) are in the article? I just skimmed it and even though there's an obvious bias I didn't notice anything that seemed blatantly untrue
edit: To expand on that, a statement like "[The media] lied about the Trump campaign colluding with Russia in 2016." is going to be controversial. However because "the media" is such a big umbrella, I'm sure you could find a factually untrue article published about the collusion. It's a bit tautological: if one media source publishes an article saying collusion happened, and another publishes an article saying that collusion didn't happen, one of them has to be wrong. You can decide that without determining whether or not collusion actually happened.
The word lying means an intent to deceive, not just to state something falsely. Being wrong and stating a falsehood vs lying are very different.
So maybe try to be your own devil's advocate, and see if you could see how The Federalist could be accused of lying and be unwelcome on someone else' platform.
Just to check that we're on the same page, it sounds like you're saying that the Federalist article is lying, because it accuses the press of lying without knowing whether their falsehoods were honest mistakes, as opposed to being malicious. So we should give the "the media" the benefit of the doubt and not accuse them of lying without proof of maliciousness.
I suppose the ironic argument one could make is that The Federalist deserves that same benefit of the doubt when they themselves make poorly substantiated remarks about the media lying. How do we know that their potentially false statement is being made with an intent to deceive? Kind of a lame argument, but I find the idea of it humorous.
However, I think it's reasonable to use the term "lying" without proving an intent to deceive. If a media outlet is willing to publish untruthful things that don't even stand up to the most cursory factchecking, I think it is fair to accuse them of lying. When you have such a cavalier (or perhaps even reckless) attitude towards the truth, I would place those falsehoods under the umbrella of lying.
> Google is choosing to not take the Federalists money and doesn’t want to put up Federalists billboards on its property.
That's factually incorrect. You have it backwards: Google was giving The Federalist money to advertise digital billboards on The Federalist.
Do they have the legal right to do so? Perhaps, at least until they're declared a utility and regulated, but this probably requires a lawyer to answer, because in some cases political opinions are protected in California.
Now a question for you: do people have the right to be outraged about it, and frightened by the threat Google poses to free communication and thus democracy?
Someone had to open the images in photoshop, alter them, and then upload them to a website. This isn't a simple lie of omission or a mistake, this is manufactured content to push a right-wing narrative.
Fox News consistently pushed the right-wing line that Coronavirus is a hoax until they were threatened with a lawsuit
While they were publicly telling their viewers that the virus was a hoax, internally they were implementing remote work and disease control.
Here's a giant list of the ways they've supported conservative political goals while actively working against the left, with citations and source material in the footnotes
Alright, so Fox is lying in favor of the right. That isn't evidence against The Federalist's contention that the rest of the media is lying in favor of the left.
> "On the recent protests, ZeroHedge published an article claiming that protests were fake, while The Federalist published an article claiming the media had been lying about looting and violence during the protests, which were both included in the report sent to Google."
It's a perfectly reasonable argument to make that many mainstream media outlets were downplaying the amount of rioting and looting going on relative to peaceful protests.
Yet somehow it's now WrongThink to even discuss how media may be shaping perceptions through biased reporting?
And now NBC's news-vigilantism unit can tattle to Google and shame them (and advertisers on the Google ad network) into pulling ads because two websites had the audacity to question NBC's narrative?
A healthy society functions best when there are checks and balances on all sides but unfortunately there are some who are using the recent protests and BLM to push Orwellian control of culture and media that is frankly quite disturbing.
As an aside, what exactly is "far-Right"? I've never seen any non Leftist publication described as "Right" so I'm not sure what adding "far" does other than function as a smear on anything Right of the mainstream Left.
The bigger question to ask here is where is the Google Adsense competitor? Google may have some favorite political inclination and being a private firm also has the right to deplatform anyone. But why has no Adsense alternative emerged even after so many years? Do people just enjoy Google's monopoly in advertising?
Monopolies are able to exist precisely because it's hard to challenge them.
That's why people saying "the free market will sort things out" with regard to free speech are deluding themselves. I'm not willing to wait 50 years for the free market to sort itself out while the ideal of free speech is torn asunder by private corporations.
It's actually quite easy to start a Google Ad Words competitor... it's even possible to make money. But when Google addresses the threat by offering a huge buy-out, saying "No" is very hard (and that's setting aside the question of possible investors taking the decision out of your hands).
NBC's title says (emphasis mine), "Google bans website ZeroHedge from its ad platform over COMMENTS ON protest articles".
There seems to be a lot of confusion over the reason for the ban, with people discussing how the sites' articles themselves might or might not violate policy.
NBC makes it pretty clear that's not the reason when it says "over policy violations found in the comments section".
NBC's original article did not include the distinction that it was for "comments on" the protest articles, which honestly makes Google's decision more absurd (imo).
Yeah, I thought that might be the case but wasn't sure. I think I even saw another version that came between what you linked to and the current version.
Whether it's better or worse is a whole other topic. Right now the world seems to be struggling with the question of who should police online behavior and how. That includes questions about how much responsibility a site has for user-generated content.
>That includes questions about how much responsibility a site has for user-generated content.
That is absolutely a legitimate debate to be had. I'm not quite sure how I feel about Google setting the terms of that debate, however. Usual caveats about how Google is a "private" company apply, obviously, but it does seem like a problem when a tech company with a wholly different perspective on what's "allowable" online speech and conduct uses it's market power in ads to set the rules for others.
Maybe I'm being a little dense, but I've never really like the phrase "user-generated content". At least it's honest, I suppose, because it suggests that it's something that can be "monetized" (because it's "content"). I miss old paper newspapers, and "letters to the editor".
Welcome to the realization that private corporations have too much control over the world and the worldview and governments that are publically elected rely on those corporations and their resources and their platforms to stay in power. I just have one question that I struggle with: what should one do about it?
Chomsky said "Organize and create mass movements". Does that still work today? The mass movements created uproar which led to an impeachment trial of a said individual but nothing came out of it. How would one go about to dismantle and re-structure a world where states and private firms co-depend on each other? Sadly I am at loss.
I know it's trendy on the right to say that the ultra-liberal Silicon Valley types are trying to ban conservatives from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. but I believe it's more accurate that ADVERTISERS on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc, in the name of brand safety, don't want controversial conservative content showing up adjacent to their advertising.
If Google were to make this argument, that concern for the brand-safety of their advertisers, they are pulling the ability for these sites to show ads that would make sense and be somewhat defensible... but are they simply saying these sites can still show Google ads but they cannot make money from the ads while Google still does? THAT would be different.
Are conservative statements on, say, ending illegal immigration really any more controversial than leftist statements on encouraging illegal immigration? Far more than half of America is against illegal immigration yet the AP, newsrooms across America, Universities, etc refuse to even use the term illegal immigration and recognize the problem for what it is, in spite of the majority of America's agreement on the seriousness of the problem.
It seems that in this case, and in many others, it's really the Leftist position that is "controversial" while the Rightist position is simply not popular among the Leftist elite.
The ones who dictate what is "controversial" or not are often just wielding that term as propaganda for whichever side they support.
> Are conservative statements on, say, ending illegal immigration really any more controversial than leftist statements on encouraging illegal immigration?
How can something be compared to something that doesn't exist?
> Far more than half of America is against illegal immigration yet the AP, newsrooms across America, Universities, etc refuse to even use the term illegal immigration and recognize the problem for what it is, in spite of the majority of America's agreement on the seriousness of the problem.
Even people who would agree if asked that “illegal immigration” is a problem don't necessarily prefer the term “illegal immigration”, and very often don't agree with other people who agree with that question as to what the nature of the problem is.
After all, people who think that the main problem is the system that produces illegal status for people who should be allowed, or even encouraged, to immigrate and people who think that the system is perfect but for it's failure to actually exclude all the people to whom it denies legal status can both easily agree with the statement “illegal immigration is a problem”. It's a statement people can agree with with no agreement on substance.
Are you seriously contending that "leftist statements on encouraging illegal immigration" don't exist? Like at all? No extremists on your side, huh? Pull the other one, man.
> Are you seriously contending that "leftist statements on encouraging illegal immigration" don't exist?
Not in any way symmetric conservative statements opposing illegal immigration. It's true that there are quite a lot of left-of-center statements opposing aspects the current regime of immigration restrictions, which are roughly parallel to the conservative rhetoric against illegal immigrants, but those statements are opposing illegal immigration from a different angle than the right is, not promoting illegal immigration.
> No extremists on your side, huh?
There are plenty of extrmists on the left, some of which are pro-immigrant.
But the real extremists on this issue tend to be against even the existence of the concept of illegal immigration, while the less extreme group tends to favor reform of the immigration system to better align the supply of legal immigration slots with demand for them and thus reduce the impetus for illegal immigration, and making it easier and more effective to focus enforcement efforts on immigrants that are individually undesirable (dangerous criminals, etc.) rather than merely supernumerary due to the arbitrary alotment of slots.
Are you implying that nothing should be "banned" at all? There are examples of tons of things that have to be banned to keep the society sane at some level. For examples, things that are considered illegal by the publically elected governments and hence are banned to be shown on the internet or elsewhere or promoted in anyway. What matters more is how are the decisions made whether to ban or allow some content.
In the non-virtual world, there is a publically elected state that makes those decisions. In the virtual world, those decisions are made by private companies that own that part of the virtual world. Ever since the creating of the virtual world, there has been an ongoing tug-of-war between the state and the corporations for this exact control of authority. Now that our virtual and non-virtual worlds are so intertwined with each other, the state is still trying to catch up to understand, contain and secure the virtual world but they are still at loss.
Google is saying they never demonetized the sites, but instead worked with them to address issues in their comment sections
https://twitter.com/Google_Comms/status/1272997425821540352
https://boingboing.net/2020/06/16/google-bans-the-federalist...
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-blocks-ad-revenue-zer...