gramathy t1_ja0ph9n wrote on February 25, 2023 at 11:40 PM

Reply to comment by TheTanelornian in Google adverts direct pregnant women to services run by UK anti-abortion groups by Lakerlion

Not exactly, google offers the ability to target a demographic and this group selected this group.

Now, whether google should allow targeting this group? If they just targeted pregnant women that seems like a valid demographic as they're going to have specific needs that a company would want to advertise to. Targeting people seeing an abortion though...that's going to bring out the worst.

TheTanelornian t1_ja1inf8 wrote on February 26, 2023 at 3:31 AM

I think you are drawing a distinction without a difference to my point immediately above. I believe Google has some responsibility for the end-result of providing the service to attack these women. shrug others apparently don't.

Still, any criticism of the God of the holy internets is always risky on reddit, hence the downvotes...

phdoofus t1_ja2hejl wrote on February 26, 2023 at 10:04 AM

Your argumen would make the old yellow pages a nightmare because it would hold the yellow pages company responsible for vetting every single company that chooses to advertise with it. And continue to monitor and check that every single company is doing exactly what they say they are doing. Now you have to magnify that on a global scale. At what point is there not some responsibility on the user in your model?

TheTanelornian t1_ja3viu0 wrote on February 26, 2023 at 5:30 PM

Yellow Pages is different from Google because there is no targeting of the advert. If there was a Yellow Pages tablet, that showed you ads for/against abortion (choose whichever you disagree with) repeatedly around every trade you looked up (plumber, chiropodist, lawyer, etc), then yes, it would be similar and I’d have a similar problem with it.

It is Google’s praxis of directing ads to targeted groups, coupled with the vulnerability of some of these target groups and the willingness of otherwise-aligned parties (the anti-abortion group, here) to pay Google to do this - all three combined are the problem here. I don’t think Google gets a free pass.

I know they dropped the “Don’t be evil” mantra, presumably the ability to do things like this is why…