Google AdSense Banned a Random Webpage About a 32-Year-Old Bill Because It Was About Sexual Abuse (vice.com) 110
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Earlier this week, an algorithm made an absurd choice. Google AdSense, Google's advertising program that makes up the bulk of the tech giant's advertising revenue, decided that a web page about a decades-old bill about sexual abuse was "adult content," and wasn't allowed to display ads anymore. The page, which is at least six years old and contains strictly legislative information about a bill called the "Child Sexual Abuse and Pornography Act of 1986" on free legislative research and tracking website GovTrack.us, tripped the AdSense algorithm that decides what pages are allowed to run ads. This single, very dry page being flagged as "adult content" is most likely a minor fluke in the AdSense algorithm, but it's a perfect example of how a tiny tweak in the way a platform uses automation to enforce policies can send a ripple through seemingly-unrelated parts of the internet. The page was flagged by Adsense as "policy non-compliant" on Monday, with Google citing the page's "violations" in a summary of the AdSense adult content policy. Here's what Google told GovTrack: "As stated in our program policies, we may not show Google ads on pages with content that is sexually suggestive or intended to sexually arouse. This includes, but is not limited to: pornographic images, videos, or games; sexually gratifying text, images, audio, or video; pages that provide links for or drive traffic to content that is sexually suggestive or intended to sexually arouse." The GovTrack page contains none of these, yet the page still can't run AdSense.
Jesus (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Jesus (Score:4, Informative)
And the appeal was instantly denied, even though any human loading the page would immediately see that the ban was probably a mistake, and could make sure of it in less than a minute.
When algorithms make mistakes, humans need to be there to fix them, and they clearly aren't. That's the problem. Slashdot is going to get a bit overcrowded if the only way to get these mistakes fixed is to get a story posted.
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I don't know if it's really a mistake. A kid reading that page will have a lot of questions, similar to if he had read an adult content story.
Re:Jesus (Score:4, Insightful)
Web pages that make kids ask questions have NO PLACE on the Internet!
*sarcasm*
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If people do not censor goggle out of existence, then google will continue to censor the people. They really have become quisling corp, censors for the establishment, propagandists for the 1%, just straight up evil is as evil does, google rewards lies for profit and tries to economically destroy those who expose the truth to the people.
Re:Jesus (Score:4, Insightful)
It is always easy to say if it is other guy's problem, or?
How about some obscure and unknown to you algorithm decides that you are dead and locks all your accounts? How do you even call help desk (assuming you know who is responsible and that they take calls from minions like you and me) if your mobile contract has been cancelled? There was an article here about guy who whose contract was wrongly marked as terminated by HR system - it took people 3 weeks to reverse from that mistake. Your statement shows that Milgram experiment was correct and showed real attitudes - we do not have guys in black uniforms with some odd emblems on it to tell us what to do and whom to persecute but we have our new algorithmic overlords.
Re:Jesus (Score:5, Insightful)
That's well understood. The problem is when there is no human oversight to correct the inevitable mistakes that bots make either before or after the fact. Had you actually read TFA, you would see that a request for a review of the page was sent and the prompt (probably also automated) response was NO.
If you're going to let bots make the decisions, "talk to the hand" is not a very good response to questions.
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In some ways, yes. In others, the whole problem in Westworld is that the bots went and did their own thing incorrectly and no humans remained in charge.
Re:Jesus (Score:4, Interesting)
If there's no profit in manual review for adwords, then there's no reason for adwords to manually review. You cannot force another company to choose to do business with you and pay you. If they only want to pay you for webpages their algorithm is absolutely certain are safe and they're happy to lose the revenue from the questionable pages, then good for them. If you really must monetize a web page about an old law, you can find another company that'll pay you your 3 cents for it.
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Keep in minmd, there's also no profit in support or accepting returns on defective products. If Google wants to be known as the "talk to the hand" company, that's their funeral to plan. I reserve the right to remind people that if they're hoping for any actual support if something goes wrong, they may want to look elsewhere.
Are there enough humas to do such a review? (Score:2)
The problem is when there is no human oversight to correct the inevitable mistakes that bots make either before or after the fact.
Web plublication (some of it automated) occurs at computer speed and there's a lot of it. _Live Science_ estimated total internet traffic at a zettabyte per year, and that
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What does total traffic have to do with publication? Most of that is reading published articles, not posting of new articles.
But if they indeed don't have the ability to manually review, they should take a much less accusatory tone in their messages to allow for the distinct possibility that their bot is wrong. There's something about a bot being dead wrong coupled with a message that demands that the recipient must be in the wrong, especially when it is followed up with further messages indicating no belie
Re:Jesus (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what today's generation puts up with. Me, I can't get over the fact that free speech is decided by unccountable giant megacorps who can't be reined in by government because of their sheer size - not to mention, because they're in bed with said government. I'm always amazed to see what people are willing to accept these days that we weren't...
So yeah, you get over it. I don't. Not that I or people from another era matter nowadays though, mind you: we're old enough that this isn't our world anymore. We're just here for the ride. But the ride gets scarier by the day for us.
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Me, I can't get over the fact that free speech is decided by unccountable giant megacorps
I don't remember the part in the constitution where it says businesses are not allowed to restrict speech. Can you point it out to me?
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Monopolies are not allowed to restrict speech in such a way that reinforces their monopoly.
Re:Jesus Is Lord (Score:4, Interesting)
It looks like Twitter and Facebooks are Public Forums in at least some circumstances, according to a Federal judge
https://irontrianglepress.com/2018/05/25/presidents-twitter-account-constitutes-public-forum/
Would it be OK if a privately owned toll bridge required drivers to remove all their pro-obama bumper stickers before crossing the bridge? Would it be OK for the bridge company to require people to remove their hateful anti-Islamic bumper stickers from their cars before crossing the privately own bridge?
And, suppose that I'm offended by your subject line due to my personal religious beliefs (I know many sincere Christians would be offended by your use of Jesus's name as an expletive). Do you think would be reasonable if you were censored from participating on Slashdot because of my sensitivity? Why is it OK for you to offend me with your religious hate speech?
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That legal question got asked a few times during the ownership and building of large open spaces in different parts of the USA in past decades.
A large section of private property open to the public. That allowed people to walk around in.
Could free speech for faith and politics topics be allowed to exist in such an open location given the free flow of people?
Courts in some US states did attempt to say yes in some ways, given the free movement of peopl
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Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins
Since you're too stupid to figure it out, which is obviously why you posted as AC.
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Which amendment says google has to pay you to speak? Does it specify how much they have to pay you, are you still being persecuted if they decide to pay you less for certain content than other content?
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Where and how is free speech being denied to anyone?
The page is still there (I just checked the link and then searched for it using Duck Duck Go which found it) so its speech is freely available to anyone who wants to view it.
What am I missing?
That it's no longer monetised owing to stupid algorithms? Sure, but that's not an infringement of free speech, that's a different issue.
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How can I utilize that to actually tell the bots to think that other pages also aren't eligible for ads?
AI (Score:1)
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AI = Artificial Idiocy
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The holy trinity (Score:3, Insightful)
Activists + technical incompetence + blind reliance on technology.
The holy trinity of how to fuck things up.
Google- the new witchfinder general (Score:2, Interesting)
This proves that they (google inc that is) is not fit to manage this sort of thing.
Years ago, a search that I did was blocked because it contained the letters SEX. It wasn't for sex but Middlesex but google decided in its wisdom that this was not allowed.
Middlesx is the name of a county in the UK, the name of a University and a County Cricket Club.
But the Google Puritans will keep on trying to censor our lives.
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Then there's that town in Lincolnshire...
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And Austria. [wikipedia.org]
Oops, now I've just banned this whole article from AdSense moneys with that link.
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For those who have no idea what the parent is talking about, the town Scunthorpe has terrible problems with web censorship due to having "cunt" contained within their name.
There's a whole page on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] about problems like this.
dom
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Ah. That makes a lot more sense. Based on the previous reply, I did a Google search for "f**king Lincolnshire" and got a combination of rants about people hating the area and pages whose descriptions looked suspiciously like porn sites, so that clearly wasn't right....
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Middlesx is the name of a county in the UK, the name of a University and a County Cricket Club.
I hear they are going to replace "sex" with "gender" in all those places.
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I hear they are going to replace "sex" with "gender" in all those places.
Wonder how they'll handle the words class, association, etc...
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I hear they are going to replace "sex" with "gender" in all those places.
Wonder how they'll handle the words class, association, etc...
In the brave new world of left and right wing censorship nothing will be allowed.
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The same way. The Middlegender high school parent teacher rear endociation welcomes the clbutt of 1998 for its 10th anniversary celebration.
I remember seeing an actual BBS that did exactly that (clbutt). The really hilarious thing is that if you try to search for "clbutt" in Google, unless you surround it with quotes to force an exact match, Google's synonym detection automatically uncensors it to "class".
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Their 10th anniversary?
2018 - 1998 = [number larger than 10]
Perhaps you never graduated maths clbutt? :)
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There are two hard problems in computer science: naming things, cache invalidation, and off-by-one (decade) errors.
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Google has to fail safe on AdWords as they need to please the advertisers, not the site owners. And nothing was blocked and no site has any right to demand AdWord money. This kind of thing will happen until we create a real AI and it will still make mistakes, like a person would, though perhaps both can categorise this site properly.
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Failing safe is one thing, but human oversight after the fact should be available.
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How would that benefit Google? The extra fraction of a cent they'd get for every visit to that website wouldn't pay for the position.
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If they gain a reputation for being unhelpful and officious, people will jump ship the instant competition springs up.
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That assumes there is competition, or will be. AdSense does not have any meaningful competition at this time. And it also assumes that more people will leave than it will cost them to staff that with humans. I'm not sure that would be true either.
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I'm sure a similar point was made once in Sears' boardroom...
I don't see Google disappearing today or tomorrow, but they're not immune. And it goes beyond AdSense. They also want to be a player in the cloud and many other areas where someone may remember the level of support they got in the past when choosing a vendor.
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GovTrack.us is not a taxpayer funded site.
Hardly surprising. (Score:2)
There's just too much internet to have any hope of filtering it manually, and yet filtering is required both for legal reasons and to avoid social outrage. So automated filtering is the only way - and we all know how well that works. It's got high rates of both false positives and false negatives.
It's leading to a lot of conspiracy theories though. If you read politically slanted news sites, you will see that those on the right are full of stories about how Facebook and Google are striving to force conserva
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Google could turn the filtering off - but then it would be about a week before stories start appearing about how Google "supports prostitution" or somesuch, and politicians would start to threaten regulation again.
Google's continued popularity is due specifically to a combination of clever algorithms and special cases. Their search results are useful specifically because of these factors. Yet, they never seem to apply the same diligence to their content-flagging algorithms. This is hardly surprising, but still pathetic. They obviously put their least talented employees and/or clearly an inadequate number of hours into content-flagging, given all the false positives.
Google's special sauce is content classification, an
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"suspicious content" is the operative phrase (Score:2)
You said when it comes to flagging suspicious content." I think that's an important word, suspicious. There are now more when pages than there are people on the planet. Billions of web pages to run ads on. Pages which include several words related to child sexual abuse are suspicious. Why put your ads on suspicious pages?
More specifically, on a page that has sexual words, so seems to probably be about sex, what kind of ads would be run? Perhaps a Trojan condoms ad? How pissed would Trojan be when the scree
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This raises the following questions:
- Why do you want the internet filtered? Have you internalized censorship so well that it seems natural to you?
- Why would you want Google to do the filtering?
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So all we need to do is figure out how to get the advertisers to bail out on Google?
Hmmm. A worthwhile project there.
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I didn't say that, though it is true. I said that companies have to censor to comply with the law, and that insufficient self-censorship results in politicians passing regulations to require it. Exactly what needs to be censored varies by country, but there's always something. Advertisers are just another reason. A completely unfiltered internet may be a nice dream for idealists, but it doesn't work like that in the real world.
Not seeing ads? (Score:5, Interesting)
What's the downside here?
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What's the downside here?
The downside is that oceans of "free" content only makes itself available to you because the people publishing it manage to scrape together a few pennies through advertising to pay for the platforms that host it for you. Stop pretending you don't actually understand this, it's embarrassing.
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Information wants to be free. It doesn't want to depend on some fucking deodorant company's ability to make us think we smell bad.
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Removing advertising from the Internet would leave us basically with the parts that have value.
No, it would leave us with the parts that the people willing to pay for it find valuable. Are you willing to pay for it?
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You should just take your ad supported garbage off the internet.
Why do you care? You're not looking at it, right? You don't look at ANY content that is brought to you by people who pay for what it costs by selling some ads. Right? You would never do that.
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There are ads on the internet?
Don't try posting hate speech on Facebook either! (Score:2)
https://www.washingtonpost.com... [washingtonpost.com]
Algorithms Hide Censorship (Score:1)
Stories like this are designed to make us think... "censorship algorithms make mistakes".
They also make us think... "censorship on the internet is needed to protect us".
And, "most people want censorship".
The problem is censorship. The problem is that the algorithm mistakes are a smoke screen to cover the actual intentional censorship that is taking place. Facebook and Twittter want to make sure that anti-globalist people like Trump are not elected. Facebook and Twitter and Google want to make sure they
Legalese IS adult content (Score:2)
Definitely legal language is something which children shouldn't be exposed to. Otherwise they never learn write and speak on human language correctly.
Half a century and the war goes on (Score:3)
This reminds me of The Illustrated Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, back in 1970.
As Wikipedia says: [wikipedia.org]
The report was resoundingly rejected and denounced by congress.
In response to that, along with continued attempts to, nevertheless, enforce existing, and impose new, anti-pornography laws (and otherwise harass publishers of erotic images), Earl Kemp [wikipedia.org] published an illustrated version of the report, consisting of the report's text but "replete with the sort of photographs the commission examined.".
For distributing this book he was sentenced to a year in prison, and served the federal minimum of three months and one day. (This brings up the question of how one is supposed to have a right to view something it's a crime to provide.)
Nearly half a century later the same sort of attacks on free speech continue on the new Intenet medium. And a handful of copies of the ... Illustrated Report ... are available on Amazon (with the asking price of an unused copy of over half a grand.)
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Damnit, you stole my joke! :)