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Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account

nytimes.com

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Re: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account

#171

Post by oska »

moultano wrote: post #141
bhk wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infowars being buried so deeply in the "Alex Jones" results is highly suspicious. How can Google's results be so ineffective compared to other search engines? The "Pelosi drunk" results are also markedly different from DDG. I just now tried this one because the results were being manually short-circuited the day after the video went viral, both by DDG and Google (but not Bing). It appears that DDG has reverted to del…

Google does not curate web results, ever. The results for [pelosi drunk] are different certainly, but in what sense are DDG's better? Google has a policy about "sensitive and disparaging terms associated with named individuals" in autocomplete https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/7368877?hl=en which is often why you sometimes may not see the queries in autocomplete that you expect. It also has a policy about "…

> Google does not curate web results, ever.

Where is the transparency or independent third party oversight to back up this statement?

Or do we just have to take it on faith?

Re: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account

#172

Post by nailer »

_qbjt wrote: post #83
metalchianti wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has been shown to interfere with results that don't align with the company's political values. It's harder to believe that this suspension WASN'T politically motivated.

Which of Tulsi Gabbard’s views don’t align with the “political values” of Google? Sorry if I’m misinformed but from what I’ve seen Tulsi seems like a very reasonable politician. She may be somewhat of an outsider in terms of foreign policy but overall she has pretty standard left-leaning positions and I’ve never heard her resort to extreme rhetoric (a rare quality in today’s politics). If I’m buying into this logic I…

Gabbard doesn't believe in identity politics, thinks we should avoid making Syria a quagmire, was a soldier, and has a homophobic Dad. The first makes her the enemy to the hard left, so she is criticized for the later.

Re: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account

#173

Post by jessaustin »

Laukhi64 wrote: post #151
jessaustin wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK sure that might be an exception, not least because the Nazis were, like... Nazis . [EDIT: The "might" is intentional. If USA had stayed home, the war might have ended in 1943. Isn't it possible that fewer people would have died in a much shorter war?] If you don't like Nazis, however, I don't think you can support Wilson's lying our way into WWI. That certainly cost lives, and by forcing Germany into an untenable…

It's true that a Nazi victory was practically impossible. But I have no idea how you can say that the US prolonged the war. Supplying the enemies of the Reich and fighting against them is not the sort of thing that causes wars to extend longer, and certainly it drew resources away from Barbarossa. >by forcing Germany into an untenable position No more untenable than what Germany had forced upon France following the F…

...practically impossible.

Germany had taken the entire continent. The British only held on as long as they did because we were happy to lose so many cargo ships to U-boats. Without our massive support they would have followed the French example, and that would have been the right decision. The war would have been over much sooner. In that case FDR probably wouldn't have baited Japan into their calamitous mistake either.

Would that have been a bad result? Probably! The Holocaust alone disqualified the German polity from any authority whatsoever, and they got up to all sorts of other evil shit besides. The point is that this hypothetical Big European War would have lasted less time than WWII and therefore it's possible that fewer people would have died.

Unless you're talking about...

I meant the election promises, but I suppose the Republicans at the time also wanted war because money. These things aren't decided by the plebes...

Re: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account

#174

Post by illvm »

jinushaun wrote: post #134
cwkoss wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gabbard insinuates the initial suspension was politically motivated The subtext I'm reading is that the "major" political accounts probably have specific flags set by Google internally to prevent automated shut-offs like this. If Google is not applying these whitelist flags to all candidates in a fair and systematic fashion, it would effectively be utilizing their corporate resources to disproportionately benefit c…

It's like keeping track of pirated content. You're assuming Google is on top of everything happening in the world. They're not and simply can't be. I would not be surprised if this was a manually curated whitelist that a human has to add to a table.

No it's not? There is a venerable plethora of pirated content. There are less than 2 dozen presidential candidates. If there is some override table which was manually updated, then the person who updated it, at minimum, did not perform due diligence to ensure that all candidates were listed.

Re: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account

#175

Post by lukifer »

anm89 wrote: post #144
lukifer wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's been talk of antitrust/etc recently regarding big tech companies, from Warren and others. For better or worse, it occurred to me recently that we have no concept of eminent domain [0] when it comes to technology, data, or intellectual property. If it's in the public interest to build a bridge, lay train tracks, etc., your private property can be purchased against your wishes at a fair market price. When it co…

As it should be. Eminent domain is a policy that's is designed to be abused if there ever was one. I suspect that the only reason eminent domain has such a fancy name is to take focus of the fact that the other word for it is theft.

Assuming the "fair market value" clause is honored (to the extent such a thing is possible!), it's not quite as bad as explicit theft. Nonetheless, I take your point. While I can imagine a number of public works projects that are painfully difficult to achieve through only voluntary coordination[0], it's also clearly an easily corruptible mechanism.

That said, I can actually imagine such a practice being more valid for intellectual property, given that IP law is a purely artificial construct of the state (as opposed to natural law governing land and physical property).

Perhaps the "eminent" part is unnecessary, and the government could simply negotiate a price for certain IP and/or data to be bought and put into the public domain?

Just spitballing. The trend to consolidation based on Metcalfe's Law[1] represents a very real conundrum for vibrant competition of products and services whose primary value is the network itself.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_anticommons

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law

Re: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account

#176

Post by tenpies »

derp_dee_derp wrote: post #8

Both sides, Democrat and Republican, are now anti big tech. Love it or Hate it, when you piss off the most powerful governing body on the planet you're in for a bad time. My question is more timeframe: Google obviously won't be broken up tomorrow, but probably earlier than a decade from now. I guess the timeframe depends on who wins the next presidential election?

The worst part is I think both sides have at least some merit for their suspicion. Obviously the Republicans seem to be more openly punished and the balance tipped against them, but the Democrats also suffer occasionally, especially if they are not the right Democrat.

Google might be treading dangerously close to becoming persona non-grata for 50% of the population, regardless of who wins. There is also a cautionary tale there that perhaps the whole idea of "don't talk politics at work" was not some tool from The Man to keep workers subdued, but rather a hard-earned lesson to keep companies from imploding when employers think they've been hired to be activists.

Surprise, turns out not everything has to be political and your personal identity doesn't have to bleed over to your professional life.

Re: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account

#177

Post by Erik816 »

belltaco wrote: post #166
Mike_Ehling wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BUT Tulsi has bought and paid for the Google Ads that were disabled during a critical SIX hours when interest in her was high and her top placed ad would have driven traffic to her donation page. She BOUGHT that ad time just as much as an advertiser buys Superbowl ad time. This was an outright breach of contract.

Pretty sure her campaign wasn't charged for ads that weren't shown. If you buy a Superbowl ad and it wasn't shown and you weren't charged for it, it isn't a breach of contract.

In that hypothetical, it would definitely be a breach of contract. If you paid for an ad during the Super Bowl expecting it to be run, and then it wasn't, that's a breach. Refunding your money may or may not make you whole. What if that was the only way to reach your target customers, and now you can't do it for another year?

There are contracts you can breach and just provide a refund, and no one is worse off. But that's not always the case, and any material failure to not perform under the contract is a breach.

Re: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account

#178

Post by compuguy »

nailer wrote: post #169
adamsea wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is entirely possible but I don’t trust Russia Today as a source, and, I have never heard of IJR before. Would like to see other sources saying the same.

Keep on mind the top post is recommending we read a Vox media site.

Last time I checked, Vox media isn't tied to, nor funded by the Russian government. Russia Today (RT) is.

Re: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account

#179

Post by dang »

ukd1 wrote: post #114
dang wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, switched to that from https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/25/8930373/google-tulsi-gabb... .

It might be higher quality, but the paywall sucks.

We allow paywalls with workarounds here, even though they suck, because HN would suck worse without articles from NYT, Economist, New Yorker, WSJ, and others. Rather than complaining about the paywall, it would be better to look for the workaround. There's at least one posted to this thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

Re: Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google for Suspending Ad Account

#180

Post by Gibbon1 »

rory096 wrote: post #12

Since OP has no actual information, some excerpts from the NYT story: >Tulsi Now Inc., the campaign committee for Ms. Gabbard, said Google suspended the campaign’s advertising account for six hours on June 27 and June 28, obstructing its ability to raise money and spread her message to potential voters. >The lawsuit also said the Gabbard campaign believed its emails were being placed in spam folders on Gmail at “a di…

> but offered no other explanation for what had happened.

And yeah she should be suing to force discovery.

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