Ah, yes. The standard pipeline scammy ad/post -> report -> This Does Not Violate Our ...

Bonus points if you can get banned for any reason, by contrast, on sites like Facebook

Fuck all of you. Shut them all down, jail time for execs

"Don't be evil."

Has anyone ever actually even purchased anything just because of an ad?

In fact, these days ads have the opposite effect: A repetitive ad turns people off from EVER checking out that product.

F Grammarly and ClickUp etc. I've never tried those products but I have disgust for them thanks to their ads.

imagine if a TV network served scammy ads during prime-time TV.

Mere consequences of the "free market". Applying the so-called "Hanlon's razor" to one of the most malicious actors in the planet is borderline delusional (or malicious :P ).

Youtube's bitcoin doubler scams are a great example of this... they run essentially the same videos over and over again, usually Elon Musk, Michael Saylor, or Steve Wozniak, occasionally Warren Buffet and a few others-- with some ticker or scroll telling people about a special promotion where whatever bitcoin you send them will be sent back doubled.

It takes basically nothing to reliably identify these videos. They're extremely heavily promoted with ads running on other videos. Google does nothing with them when reported. Google does not proactively remove them. And because, contrary to the documentation, youtube doesn't pull the verified flag from a channel when its name is changed, these scams go out on channels that look like official sources for the celebrities in them (they steal some random verified channel then change its name to SpaceX (official) or Microstrategy or whatever).

Google even got sued unsuccessfully by Woz and some of the scam victims-- and their response was pound the "S230 is an absolute shield for externally provided material" table and continue to do nothing about the fraud except rake in money from pedaling it. They haven't even fixed the verified flag issue.

(Shades of the same conduct were seen in the old viacom v. youtube case, -- users were reporting copyright infringements so they took away the button.)

I have sympathy for the S230 shield and consider it very important-- but the law is the absolute worst we're allowed to be. They are free to do better (and the CDA shield was designed to assure they can moderate without picking up liability).

Google's conduct is irresponsible, unethical, and may well cost us this important legal protection because if society's choice is liability for hosts OR the biggest and wealthiest companies do nothing while raking in money from even the most flagrant scams we're going to eventually choose liability with dire consequences for free speech.

It's especially ironic that the smaller sites and forums (like HN) would be hit especially hard by a narrowing of S230, but these forms reliably work hard to remove the worse abuse-- and are seldom the source of anything that truly offends the senses at least not for long. Companies like google that don't are ones that are so wealthy and powerful that they're almost intractable to litigate against even without S230 like protection. Loss of it would hurt them gravely but it would hurt everyone smaller more.

because they're greedy capitalist mfs making a lot of money of scams

Google doesn't care because they figured out no one will hold them accountable any more.

The US regulatory authorities DGAF ever since Lina Khan exited the picture and the EU regulatory authorities might have the legal basis to hold Big AdTech accountable, but the EU is at the moment busy trying to fend off BS from the Trump admin, they do not have time and risk appetite (aka Trump retaliating on behalf of Big AdTech) left for scam ads.

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