I’m surprised there is no liability for facilitating scams / fraud on the ad networks given that they’re making money on it.
I don't see how it is not wire fraud. But in this country the FBI only goes after what is politically important.
YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads
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Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads
#92I love Youtube and consider it a major contribution to the modern world -- however it would have been "invented" within a few months regardless of who built if first and would have grown regardless of who acquired it.
It's important to recall that Youtube grew not because of "you" -- there was really not any kind of creator ecosystem for the first phase of massive growth. Youtube grew because of piracy and the posting/distribution of copyrighted content.
Unlike Napster which was blatantly P2P and obviously tried to circumvent copyright protections, Youtube had an official way for content owners to take steps to remove unauthorized content. In the days or weeks that it took to get content removed, it was copied and re-posted, and all the while Youtube continued to earn ad revenue from it until finally, many dollars later, it would be removed and successfully blocked.
In Today's world, Youtube makes money by incentivizing generatively created garbage content, much of which is shown to kids, and by spamming promoted content into playlists and generally always preferring to play content that was promoted over non-promoted content.
It's not clear how much of Youtube's revenue comes from quality content that people consume intentionally vs content that nobody would ever pay for that has managed to hijack the recommendation algorithm in some way.
Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (I'm in Canada) The reply was it didn't break any policy. When ads are the primary source of revenue, there's zero incentive to police the platform TL;DR: If you're a major on-line ad distributor like Google/Meta, and broadcast malicious ads to consumers, then you should be liable for them according to local laws just how TV and radio broadcasters are liable for the same thing. Long argument: Sure those ads don't b…
If you're a major on-line ad distributor like Google/Meta, and broadcast malicious ads to consumers... It's actually worse than that. If they were neutrally broadcasting, they'd at least have the argument that they were conceptually just a common carrier providing a neutral conduit between advertisers and consumers. But they are actively selecting which ads to present to which consumers---with respect to scam ads, th…
Indeed, you're right, I missed that. Big-tech's targeted advertising tech makes their scam ads way more dangerous to the targeted individuals, than similar scams broadcasted blindly to gen-pop on radio and TV.
It's kind of like the difference between a WW2-era dumb bomb and a modern GPS & laser-guided smart bomb. Way more deadly at the same payload.
Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads
#94Twitter actually has some of the best ad oversight, almost entirely by accident too. Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) lets users flag tweets that are misleading. Since Ads on Twitter are just normal tweets, they can be fact checked. Twitter's average ad quality has plummeted recently, but most of the scam ads I see have a massive user-added disclaimer outlining how it's a scam. I wonder how this affects the click…
I think when an ad is fact-checked and fails that test, it should become hidden. Even better would be to block the advertiser from the network or even seize their ad spent.
Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads
#95As it turns out there is a whole category in YouTubes ad system for Get-Rich-Quick schemes, as detailed out in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkhGJUTW3ag&t=1031s (timestamped at the relevant time). Just today I saw my elderly father click on a YouTube ad link for a crypto scam copying Swedish televisions web layout he was reading it and I saw it at the corner of my eye. He has adblock installed, he disabl…
> What is he supposed to do, create a google account and get premium instead?
Yes? I've mostly quit watching YouTube (and really a lot of media) because the shear amount of it and the number of predatory dark patterns have just gotten to be too much for me (it's possible that I'm overly sensitive in some way). But if it's important to him, then maybe it's worth paying some money for the experience. Personally I'm trying to get back into reading/audiobooks.
Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads
#96Twitter actually has some of the best ad oversight, almost entirely by accident too. Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) lets users flag tweets that are misleading. Since Ads on Twitter are just normal tweets, they can be fact checked. Twitter's average ad quality has plummeted recently, but most of the scam ads I see have a massive user-added disclaimer outlining how it's a scam. I wonder how this affects the click…
I've been thinking about this for a while. I've seen many of these community notes - how exactly do these work ? Is a community note borne out of "most upvoted" replies to a particular tweet ? If so, how does it go from a simple upvoted reply, to a "community note" ?
Basically if you are in good standing on the platform you can apply to be a contributor and if accepted you can submit and rate notes. The note which actually appears to everyone is selected out of the contributor submitted notes using some algorithm which is open source.
> To find notes that are helpful to the broadest possible set of people, Community Notes takes into account not only how many contributors rated a note as helpful or unhelpful, but also whether people who rated it seem to come from different perspectives.
https://communitynotes.twitter.com/guide/en/about/introducti...
Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads
#97I love Youtube and consider it a major contribution to the modern world -- however it would have been "invented" within a few months regardless of who built if first and would have grown regardless of who acquired it. It's important to recall that Youtube grew not because of "you" -- there was really not any kind of creator ecosystem for the first phase of massive growth. Youtube grew because of piracy and the postin…
If I had Facebook money, I'd use Peertube to create a clone of Youtube with the Internet Archive as the storage backend of last resort ($2/GB for perpetual storage). Trust and Safety team to keep the stuff out that could cause you to lose your safe harbor. Cloudflare for new, high demand content, serve from the datacenter long tail. Plug into ActivityPub, Wordpress, Mastodon, etc. Not quite Wikipedia for video, but similar governance and operating spirit.
Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads
#98https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/#/
I suppose it would be nice if there were an easy way for everyone to do this.
Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads
#99I love Youtube and consider it a major contribution to the modern world -- however it would have been "invented" within a few months regardless of who built if first and would have grown regardless of who acquired it. It's important to recall that Youtube grew not because of "you" -- there was really not any kind of creator ecosystem for the first phase of massive growth. Youtube grew because of piracy and the postin…
If I had Facebook money, I'd use Peertube to create a clone of Youtube with the Internet Archive as the storage backend of last resort ($2/GB for perpetual storage). Trust and Safety team to keep the stuff out that could cause you to lose your safe harbor. Cloudflare for new, high demand content, serve from the datacenter long tail. Plug into ActivityPub, Wordpress, Mastodon, etc. Not quite Wikipedia for video, but s…
You probably could do that just with MySpace money.
Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads
#100Twitter actually has some of the best ad oversight, almost entirely by accident too. Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) lets users flag tweets that are misleading. Since Ads on Twitter are just normal tweets, they can be fact checked. Twitter's average ad quality has plummeted recently, but most of the scam ads I see have a massive user-added disclaimer outlining how it's a scam. I wonder how this affects the click…
I've been thinking about this for a while. I've seen many of these community notes - how exactly do these work ? Is a community note borne out of "most upvoted" replies to a particular tweet ? If so, how does it go from a simple upvoted reply, to a "community note" ?
You need to sign up to become a community notes contributor. Then you can add notes, and if enough people from a diverse set of other contributors find it helpful, the community note will publicly appear.
It's one of few things at Twitter that work shockingly well and reliable. I've never seen an obvious partisan community note. Other networks should embrace this.