Last week, U.K. advertisers including the government, the Guardian newspaper and various others began boycotting Google’s ad products, including YouTube, over the fact their ads were appearing next to troublesome content, ranging from videos promoting hate to those advocating terrorism.
The main focus of the complaints has been YouTube, although the same problem has, to some extent, affected Google’s ads on third-party sites, as well. On YouTube, the root of the problem is that the site has 400 hours of video uploaded every minute, making it impossible for anything but an army of human beings to view all the new content being put onto the site continuously. Google uses a combination of algorithmic detection, user flagging and human quality-checking to find videos advertisers wouldn’t want their ads to appear in, and those systems are far from perfect.
Restrict ads to only those videos that appear on channels with long histories of good behavior and lots of subscribers. That would likely weed out any unidentified terrorists, hatemongers and scam artists without having to explicitly identify them.
