Partially off topic, but youtube ads for me are currently 70% out and out scams - deepfaked tv personalities telling you about some government scheme where every person gets £20,000 cash.
What do you mean by a closed ecosystem in this context? Because I wouldn’t considered YT ads a closed ecosystem compared to MAO. They are both a publishing platforms, one is just paid. The problem with spam or malware is that there is monetary return for your investment in it. Paying to distribute spam or malware is reasonable strategy if there is a decent ROI. Your local businesses flooding your mailbox with spam through USPS are all paying for it.
In publishing, I’d consider something like The Economist or NTY to be a “closed ecosystem”. Many of those places (like CNBC, Fox, WaPo, etc) have auto generated spam articles every day whether it’s a company's earnings or a press release regurgitation. Sometimes that garbage can be accidentally harmful. At least we’re not at the point that CNBC push crypto miners in their blogs. We’re not far off though
Its googles advertising network - there are and should be guard rails in place. They should audit the content. They should do KYC. They should do many many things.
"it's better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission (and keep the money either way)" is probably up on the wall instead of "do no evil"
That would make it a moderated ecosystem, not a closed one.
AFAIK, Section 230 protection extends to online advertisement as these companies claim the ads are user generated content. There were many law suits against Google and Meta about being responsible for the content and ads their algorithms push and how it radicalized people or harmed people. I recall Google and Meta won all those cases.
Plus, in the 1960s there was a famous Supreme Court case against NYT for publishing a pro-civil rights ads that contained wrong claims against some like cop or politician in the south. They argues that NYT was libel for the malicious attack. The Supreme Court ruled in NYT favor because even if the ad buyers were malicious, they need to prove that NYT was also intentionally malicious in their intent
It's been like that since before "AI" (before ChatGPT's big marketing break-out)
Google's revenue is largely from promoting scams and tricking old people into clicking ads that look like normal search results. They're a total scumbag company, it's a sign of how broken consumer protection is that they've gotten away with it for years with no meaningful legal consequences.
[EDIT] Downvotes are warranted, I missed the large part of their revenue that comes from extorting companies into paying for ads for their own brand name so competitors and scams don't top searches for them.
It’s getting so much worse though. This post is from 2020[1], and it’s much worse now as google has removed the bold “Ads” word into a “sponsored” heading that is different across desktop and mobile and for the most part appears to be part of the list header rather than attached to any particular ad.
Bing is 10 times worse. They intermix search results with ads, and the only indication is a small light-gray/white “WEB” or “AD” tag that has a css blur and pixilation effect. It’s so subtle it’s insane.
YES. I get constant Deepfake Oprah and Joe Rogan ads on YouTube. They know about it. They just don't care. Google can easily demonetize channels, block videos, anytime you talk about something controversial (Covid-19 vaccines, Jan 6, election denial, etc...)
A few years back when people were talking about Q-Anon / Pedophile celebrities thousands of YouTube channels were taken down simultaneously of anyone, ANYONE, who was talking about it. "Mouthy Buddha" on YouTube had just 2 videos on the subject and had his channel taken down and was never allowed back on. They all migrated over to BitChute at the time. The YouTube press release claimed about 10,000 videos and their channels removed.
So Google does have ways of scanning content and banning the scam ads, they just don't want to.
Even the closed ecosystems are infected.