Highlights:
- Tech giant Google blocks several terms associated with hate speech.
- Advertisers frequently searched for terms like “white lives matter” and “white power”.
- Google has been blocking advertisers from using terms such as “Black Lives Matter” to find videos.
- YouTube is running multi-layered enforcement strategy for the investigation.
Introduction:
Tech giant Google has blocked several terms associated with hate speech. The company prevents them from being used as ad keywords on YouTube videos.
The move follows a report by The Markup. It found that advertisers could search for terms like “white lives matter” and “white power” when deciding where to place ads on YouTube.
Google offered advertisers hundreds of millions of choices for YouTube videos and channels related to White supremacist and other hate terms when we began our investigation.
It includes “all lives matter” a phrase frequently used as a dismissive rejoinder to Black Lives Matter and “White lives matter” which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as both a neo-Nazi group and “a racist response to the civil rights movement Black Lives Matter.”
Google’s YouTube ad targeting terms to remove hate speech
YouTube has battled hate speech on its platform for several years, with mixed results. In 2019, it banned white supremacist content, and the company said it would restrict channels from monetizing videos that “repeatedly brush up against our hate speech policies,” preventing them from running ads.
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said the company’s hate speech policy “specifically bans videos alleging that a group is superior based on qualities like race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion.”
Google suggests it does not publicly disclose how it develops its enforcement applications. Therefore, the so-called poor actors cannot circumvent its rules.
The Markup reached out to YouTube parent company Google for comment, it said the company actually blocked more racial and social justice terms, including “Black excellence” and “civil rights.”
YouTube is running multi-layered enforcement strategy for the investigation.
YouTube has several layers of protection in place to prevent offensive or harmful ads from running on its platform. It also regularly removes videos containing hate speech. Last year, the company says it blocked more than 867 million ads. They were trying to evade its detection systems amounting to more than 3 billion bad ads in total.
Google says it does not publicly disclose how it develops its enforcement tools. This is how the so-called bad actors can’t circumvent its rules.
YouTube has battled hate speech on its platform for several years, with mixed results. In 2019, it banned white supremacist content. The company would restrict channels from monetizing videos that “repeatedly brush up against our hate speech policies.” This will preventing them from running ads.
