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Still More Advertisers Pull Google Ads Over YouTube Hate Videos (morningstar.com) 301

"A week after Google apologized for running customers' advertisements alongside objectionable videos, triggering a change in policy, its YouTube site is still rife with examples that are angering more big advertisers and causing some to cut spending with the tech giant," reports the Dow Jones Newswire. Reporters from the Wall Street Journal spotted ads from Microsoft, Amazon, and Procter & Gamble appearing on hate videos -- and thus indirectly funding them. An anonymous reader quotes their report: Asked about the Journal's finding that their ads were still appearing with such content on YouTube as of Thursday night, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo Inc., Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Dish Network Corp. said Friday they were suspending spending on all Google advertising except targeted search ads. Starbucks Corp. and General Motors Co. said they were pulling their ads from YouTube. FX Networks, part of 21st Century Fox Inc., said it was suspending all advertising spending on Google, including search ads and YouTube. Wal-Mart said: "The content with which we are being associated is appalling and completely against our company values."
An executive at one of the affected companies complained that Google "had assured us over the past few days that our brands were safe from this type of content. Despite their assurances, it's clear they couldn't give assurance."
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Still More Advertisers Pull Google Ads Over YouTube Hate Videos

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  • Alternative media. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 26, 2017 @12:39AM (#54111147)

    Everyone say goodbye to dissenting opinions on YouTube.

    • by Kunedog ( 1033226 ) on Sunday March 26, 2017 @02:12AM (#54111339)

      Everyone say goodbye to dissenting opinions on YouTube.

      Disagreement is now harrassment.
      Mockery is now hate speech.
      Offense is now trauma.
      Criticism is now abuse.
      Compelling criticism is now violence.
      Anyone who talks about subjects the MSM wants to suppress is now a troll.
      Anyone at random is a racist/sexist/white supremacist/nazi/etc if they say so.

      The use of this alarmist (and usually, simply wrong) language is ubiquitous and deliberate. It's all a pretense to justify a disproportionate censorial "response," especially when they know no response is warranted at all. It's also a brazenly transparent tactic, especially since Twitter/Reddit/etc rarely seem to use it against users that properly align with their politics.

      A popular tranny just had two of her YT videos demonitized, one that criticized Islam, and another that criticized feminism:
      https://twitter.com/MsBlaireWh... [twitter.com]

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        And refusing to give you a platform is now genocide.

        Don't get me wrong, YouTube has fucked up royally here, but your claims are laughable because I can still go to YouTube right this second and watch neo-Nazis spouting off, or Carl of Swindon ranting about feminazis, or The Golden One living out his liberal murder fantasies in video games, and all still monetized.

        It's obvious to anyone with a level head that YouTube is just incompetent. You can't attribute any political or philosophical or moral motivation

        • by Raenex ( 947668 ) on Sunday March 26, 2017 @08:06AM (#54111997)

          And refusing to give you a platform is now genocide.

          Who is claiming that? Oh, you, in typical strawman fashion.

          Don't get me wrong, YouTube has fucked up royally here, but your claims are laughable because I can still go to YouTube right this second and watch neo-Nazis spouting off, or Carl of Swindon ranting about feminazis, or The Golden One living out his liberal murder fantasies in video games, and all still monetized.

          How does that refute what is desired by the leftist agitators versus what YouTube is actually doing? The boycott came about because YouTube didn't sufficiently turn itself into a "safe space".

          It's obvious to anyone with a level head that YouTube is just incompetent. You can't attribute any political or philosophical or moral motivation to their actions, because they are too inconsistent to be rational.

          It's obvious to anybody who's been paying attention that the left has been hysterically ramping up their cries about "hate speech" and leveling it at anybody who opposes their ideological positions.

        • YouTube is just incompetent

          Right, watching and listening to 150 hours of new content uploaded every hour should be easy peasy.

          Just imagine the cost of doing this. Imagine how problematic this is. The people forced/choosing to do this are subjecting themselves to abuse, at some point or continuously.

          And how does one police/supervise the "reviewers"? Why, you need another person to listen to the same stuff to make sure, right?

          Sounds like an impossible assignment to me.

          The way I would handle it is to tell a

          • Right, watching and listening to 150 hours of new content uploaded every hour should be easy peasy.

            If your argument is that Google cannot afford to hire 150-200 additional employees, it's a pretty lousy argument.

            And how does one police/supervise the "reviewers"? Why, you need another person to listen to the same stuff to make sure, right?

            Your failure is of imagination. No, no you don't. You let the community flag your misses. Just getting the vast majority of them would do the job.

            Sounds like an impossible assignment to me.

            That's because you're being disingenuous. Or dumb.

          • Why would you need to watch or listen to 150 hours of new content?

            A dozen unpaid interns can adequately police all videos for advertisers.

            1: A video doesn't have ads on it for the first 50,000 views. Adjust to the 98th or whatever percentile Google feels is worth losing ad revenue over vs. not hiring more people. (Even unpaid interns cost money.)

            2: Once a video crawls out of the sewer and hits 50,000 views, or whatever magic number you have decided upon, toss it into a reviewer queue.

            3: An unpaid inter

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • and it hasn't been. Ever. You're full of it and spouting a right wing talking point used to shut down attempts to attack what is very plainly attempts to legitimize violent racism once again. Piss off.
    • I doubt people who sit and spout racist shit into a camera are doing it for profit.

      • by sudon't ( 580652 )

        I doubt people who sit and spout racist shit into a camera are doing it for profit.

        A lot aren't, but some want to spout racist shit full-time, (and likely have a hard time holding down a job anyway), and there are many others who are less ideological than greedy, and have discovered how remunerative clickbait can be, and what an easy target the Right is. Advertising dollars make this possible. That's how we ended up with all this fake news.

        I get why many advertisers wouldn't want to be associated with this dreck but, and you can ask Anonymous Coward, racist assholes buy stuff, too. Luckil

    • Everyone say goodbye to dissenting opinions on YouTube.

      The basis of the "insightful" moderation is eluding me. Par for today's Slashdot, though I remain more discouraged by the lack of actually "funny" comments. Or perhaps I should say dismayed by both?

      Or maybe it's just too hard for me to imagine why anyone would pay to advertise anything on YouTube. For a lot of the user-generated content the adjective execrable is just too kind. Not sure about "dissenting opinions", but the only ones I remember noticing were on the wrong side of execrable.

      These is some legit

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

        Or maybe it's just too hard for me to imagine why anyone would pay to advertise anything on YouTube.

        Advertisers' goal is typically to connect with stupid people who will buy shit they don't need. And what a coincidence: people too dumb to block ads on Youtube are spectacularly stupid, thus ideal for typically sophomoric marketing tactics designed to make people feel bad enough about themselves to buy some garbage.

    • by jandersen ( 462034 ) on Sunday March 26, 2017 @06:46AM (#54111839)

      Here's an interesting article: http://www.freepresshouston.co... [freepresshouston.com]

      'Free speech' has become a mantra for bullying the people whose opinion is that there are things they don't like and don't want to see; but that in itself becomes a kind of censorship. Not by the government, but by other groups - and it is extremely easy to bombard websites with updates that drown out opinions that you as a person or group don't like.

      Ideally, if all people were honest and genuinely played by the rules of good citizenship etc, free speech would be truly free, but it only takes a small minority of bullies to take that away. Governments in democratic countries don't actually want to limit people's freedom of speech, because when people feel they can let off steam, they are less likely to want to upset things too much. It is the different bullying groups, the extremists, religious or otherwise, who talk the loudest about "freedom" and constitutional right, and they are also the ones who are working the hardest to take that away from the general public.

  • by elrous0 ( 869638 ) on Sunday March 26, 2017 @12:50AM (#54111177)

    I've yet to see a single link to one of these "hate videos" that supposedly has these companies so pissed. While I've no doubt that there are hateful videos on Youtube (there are pretty much ALL KINDS of video on Youtube), are they actually citing specific videos here, or just reacting to vague reports that that OMG! there may be some assholes on Youtube (clutch the pearls!!)?

    • by wvmarle ( 1070040 ) on Sunday March 26, 2017 @01:00AM (#54111205)

      Or an excuse to pull out of a failing venture?

      The few online ads that make it through to me are usually totally irrelevant - except those that come with Google's search results as those are based on my location and current interest, i.e. what I happen to search for. The rest is mostly adblocked to begin with.

      Also I have seen relevant ads on other sites - where the site itself sold the ads, to advertisers directly related to the topic at hand (a recycling site posting banner ads of recycling companies).Those were not adblocked, in part for not being part of an ad network so they fell off the radar. Not intrusive and relevant ads, that's totally fine with me.

      So it sounds like Internet advertising has to go back to basics. Sites themselves selling ads to advertisers instead of pulling in random ads. Advertisers themselves looking for relevant places to show their ads, instead of having their ads plastered over random sites. At the same time those failing ad networks can stop their invasive tracking and profiling, as it's quite obvious that doesn't work either.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        The few online ads that make it through to me are usually totally irrelevant

        So, slightly better than most other forms of advertising then... Like TV and billboards which are usually totally irrelevant. Also remember that AdBlock makes the tracking/profiling less effective so you are probably not getting typical results. People without ad blocking find ads creepily following them around the web and stuff like that.

        All they really care about is that their ads don't appear next to overtly racist content, stuff that uses the n-word and is thus easy for journalists to find.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 26, 2017 @01:06AM (#54111217)

      For starters, here's an entire channel called Dindu Nuffins [youtube.com] with nothing but racist videos.

      There are video series like Chimpout! episode 2 [youtube.com] (and 1, 3, 4, etc.) which encourage such insightful dialogue as:

      "IF ANY MARSHAL WANTS TO COME DIE FOR A JEW, THEN COMEOVER AND TELL ME TO GO TO YOUR COURT OR SOMETHING EQUALLY AS STUPID. I HAVE HAD ENOUGH AND WILL NOT PARTICIPATE IN THIS RHESUS MONKEY BLOOD RITUAL. THE NEGRO GRAVEN IMAGE AND THE ALBINO JEW GRAVEN IMAGE NEGRO CAN TAKE THEIR BLOOD DRINKING ELSE WHERRE."

      There are thousands of apparent one-off videos like You stupid fucking n-ggers! [youtube.com]

      Hatred is all over YouTube, just as it's all over the internet in general. I imagine the advertisers are responding to the phenomenon at large, and not to specific videos or artists, otherwise they could just request to have their ads pulled from those specific channels. (I have no idea whether or not there were ever ads running on the links above, I don't see YouTube ads thanks to uBlock.)

      • by Mashiki ( 184564 )

        Guess that's why they're also demonetizing anti-racism videos too right? Their definition of "not advertiser friendly" seems to be: "We're gonna jam our face into the politics of the day, because someone here feels uncomfortable with the subject matter."

      • There are thousands of apparent one-off videos like You stupid fucking n-ggers! [youtube.com]

        I don't think that particular one is a good example of being "hate" (where hate means racism.) Sure, it treads on thin ice, and probably isn't something you'd want to place any ads on, but it sits more on the side of discourse. I suppose you could call it uncivil discourse.

        And then there's this guy:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Sunday March 26, 2017 @05:48AM (#54111735) Homepage Journal

        The advertisers don't want to police it themselves, checking individual channels for suitability. They want it to be like TV, where they say "we want X minutes/day, and only during family-friendly programming" and the network does the rest. That's kind of the whole point about how YouTube advertising works - Google has massive analytics and targeting capability which obviously they don't want to share with anyone, so you just get to select your parameters and they do the rest.

    • by Dutch Gun ( 899105 ) on Sunday March 26, 2017 @01:20AM (#54111243)

      Perhaps also an effort to encourage Google to come back and offer these advertisers some discounted rates? It's unlikely that these advertisers will stay away for long. But why not pull out of a deal temporarily and see if things look more favorable for the next contract?

      I don't think there's a lot of love for the dominant position Google has in internet advertising, so of course other companies will take any opportunity they can get to stick it too them just a bit. This just seems like an excuse to do that.

      • by mysidia ( 191772 )

        Perhaps also an effort to encourage Google to come back and offer these advertisers some discounted rates?

        Chances are Google won't need to. I would bet that other companies will continue to buy those ad slots, regardless of what Walmart may do, now it may be true that the winning bids for those ads will be lower as a result of less competition from Walmart, etc, But this is all at Walmart's loss.

        • Hmm, not sure I agree. Walmart is a retail store, and won't really care whether they're advertising on YouTube or not. There are plenty of other advertisement avenues for them.

          However, Google's billions are made almost *entirely* from online advertising. I'm not saying they'll necessarily take a significant hit from this, but you can bet that this is *much* more concerning to them, as it's affecting the reputation of their most important service, financially speaking. I'd bet we'll see some sort of proa

      • People rarely have a lot of love for the party in the position to charge them more; but the fact that a 'search company' apparently can't make any useful promises regarding where your ads will end up is probably not helping their position on this one.

        Even in situations where everything is pretty banal; advertisers generally want some targeting of the impressions they are paying for to the audience they are trying to reach. If Google can't demonstrate an ability to avoid certain contexts on request, why w
    • by stephanruby ( 542433 ) on Sunday March 26, 2017 @01:56AM (#54111311)

      The first article cites these examples

      Ads for Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Toyota, Dish Network, Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s Geico unit and Google's own YouTube Red subscription service appeared on racist videos with the slur "n-----" in the title as of Thursday night. Those ads ran before two videos that dub a racist song over videos of former first lady Michelle Obama or Chicago rapper Chief Keef. The videos, posted by the same account, have been viewed more than 425,000 times and 260,000 times, respectively.

      Another video titled "Black people in their natural habitat," with a racial slur in the description, played monkey noises over footage of black men in prison and images of black civil-rights leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Google showed ads for Amazon, Microsoft and GM's Chevrolet unit before or during that video.

      If it is really true that uploaders have used the "n" word and other racial slurs either in the video title or in the video description, then Google could easily prevent ads from playing over those videos.

    • Advertisers should object to sponsoring STUPID videos, not just hateful ones. They have the ability to empower thoughtful, informative, educational, and enriching videos, yet they actually choose to sponsor some of the DUMBEST POSTERS on YouTube. Don't make millionaires out of idiots who post "React" videos. Make the world better by sponsoring TED videos.
    • Youtube is just adapting to make what they publish generally more suitable for ads. The relevant model here seems to be Edward Herman's 'Propaganda Model' ,
      which is generally considered to be about news and claims that news media are mainly following business logic: they adapt to get along with their advertizers, with government sources, with powerful players that could harm them. The result is that media are very compliant with the dominant powers and that journalists are selected for how well they fit int

    • Right? YouTube seems to always only (for me anyway) play the exact same ad over and over, or a small group of ads. I'm assuming these companies get some type of "report" from Youtube with a list of what videos their ads are playing next to, or else how would they even know?
    • It could be because you never typed "n*****" into the youtube search bar. The article is surprisingly good and has quite a number of examples:

      Ads for Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Toyota, Dish Network, Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s Geico unit and Google's own YouTube Red subscription service appeared on racist videos with the slur "n-----" in the title as of Thursday night.

      Another video titled "Black people in their natural habitat," with a racial slur in the description, played monkey noises over footage of black men in prison and images of black civil-rights leaders Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Google showed ads for Amazon, Microsoft and GM's Chevrolet unit before or during that video.

      Google showed ads for PepsiCo's Quaker Foods unit, Microsoft's Minecraft videogame and FX Networks' "Fargo" on a 15-minute video titled "EXPOSING THE JEWISH LIES." The video showed a sermon from Steven Anderson, the founder of the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Arizona, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has deemed a hate group for promoting views that the Holocaust was a hoax and gay people should be killed.

      Part of the reason the companies are pulling support could be because they want to negotiate a better deal on advertising costs. Incidentally I couldn't post this until I starred out the n-word in my post, apparently Slashdot censors that.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Because of that pesky first amendment, the actual government can't create Ministries of Truth to arbitrate reality like some European countries are trying to do [nytimes.com] (not to mention that the people everyone wants to censor currently control all branches of government). Luckily though, the wonders of unchecked free market capitalism have created an environment where the most notorious thoughcriminals rely on advertising revenue to survive financially, and two private companies with no legal responsibilities towa

    • Censorship: n. Where someone gives you a free platform to promote your views but won't actually pay you.

      Crikey you're thin skinned if you think someone not paying you to put up videos is censorship. That's all that's happening here: YouTube is stopping them being paid advertising revenue.

  • So, though it is antithetical ti Google's business model, they could actually hire human reviewers. I am not suggesting they censor content, just accurately categorize it so advertisers and viewers could avoid the crap they don't want to support or view. Before you say it, it could be done. It might take 20,000 employees or so but it could be done.
    • So, though it is antithetical ti Google's business model, they could actually hire human reviewers.

      If that becomes the case, I'm sure Google will be in front of congress again - pleading for more H1-Bs.

    • by eWarz ( 610883 )
      #freedomofspeech.
    • by GNious ( 953874 ) on Sunday March 26, 2017 @02:37AM (#54111383)

      Seem to recall articles here on /. about Google's reviewers having to look at so much shit, they basically broke down mentally within a year - ignoring the human costs, that's a very large turn-over if you need to hire and train 20.000 new people yearly.

      • Seem to recall articles here on /. about Google's reviewers having to look at so much shit, they basically broke down mentally within a year

        There must be a subset of the 4chan-esque crowd which will do the job they are paid to do faithfully in spite of being shitlords. Hire them, their eyeballs can withstand anything.

  • It just lowers my bid. Amazing how well competition works.
  • Until it starts costing them money, at least. Once that starts happening, then I'm sure Google will suddenly start finding ways to keep advertisers' ads off of certain videos / channels.

    Facebook did more or less the same thing, as I recall. A fix is always unfeasible until not having that fix starts costing them dollars...

  • Goog;le already know a lot about the people viewing videos, and presumably each advertiser has a desired demographic for the ad. So why do Google not match the two? Put adverts against the videos which are being viewed by the particular target audience of the advert. This should satisfy both the advertiser, whose ads are being seen by the target demographic, and viewers who will be seeing a greater proportion of relevant ads.

    • Likely the algorithms are already doing this. Just that you don't want to know the Truth that someone liking your product also likes that hateful thing. So you (as advertiser/big-corp) want to disassociate yourself from that hateful stuff -- it's just hypocrisy.
  • by Leslie43 ( 1592315 ) on Sunday March 26, 2017 @03:16AM (#54111447)
    I run several chat forums and every now and then Google changes the rules, one week something is fine, the next it isn't and you're responsible to scrub all that no longer complies. Last time they did this, there was 23 million posts across several chat forums to review or risk losing my Adsense account, to which there is little recourse.

    I hope it hurts, I hope it really hurts!
  • by _Shorty-dammit ( 555739 ) on Sunday March 26, 2017 @03:32AM (#54111475)

    YT: Care to buy ad time on a platform based on random people uploading videos based on whatever randomness they're into?

    Companies: Yes!

    YT: OK, thanks!

    Companies: Hey! How come these random videos we're advertising over contain all manner of random stuff?!

    YT: Um, duh?

    • Duh is not the right reaction when dealing with a company that specialises itself in automated analytics and TARGETED advertising.

    • in the thread, but that's not how youtube sells the service. They tell advertisers that their analytics will target advertising exactly as the advertiser wants. And it will. Google will fix this and it'll become part of youtube. And yes, that means you won't be able to make money spouting controversial opinions without qualification on Youtube anymore unless you start a patreon.
  • by blind biker ( 1066130 ) on Sunday March 26, 2017 @04:26AM (#54111567) Journal

    What is ridiculous is that these holier than thou multinationals call PewDiePie videos "hate videos".

  • by tinkerton ( 199273 ) on Sunday March 26, 2017 @04:27AM (#54111569)

    Someone on here once pointed out a relevant quote from Commander William Adama:

    . There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.

    I think this is the place where diplomats warn that 'there is a risk of us moving in that direction' when they mean to describe the current situation.

    • Woops, that belongs in the terrifying anti riot vehicle thread.

  • This is where you hurt Google, in the wallet, because reporting hate videos does nothing, as long as they get views (and ad revenue).

  • The corporate overlords are finally squashing YouTube. Didn't take long.

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion

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