[Plura-list] Youtube blocks advertisers from targeting "Black Lives Matter"; Alibaba's record-setting antitrust smackdown

Cory Doctorow doctorow at craphound.com
Sat Apr 10 13:14:44 EDT 2021


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Next Tuesday, I'm giving a workshop in collaboration with Phoenix's
Changing Hands bookstore: "All the Teachable Things I Know About Writing":

https://www.changinghands.com/event/april2021/virtual-writing-workshop-cory-doctorow-all-teachable-things-i-know-about-writing

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Today's links

* Youtube blocks advertisers from targeting "Black Lives Matter": On the
impossibility of "brand safety."

* Alibaba's record-setting antitrust smackdown: Trustbusting with
Chinese characteristics.

* This day in history: 2001, 2011, 2016, 2020

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current
writing projects, current reading

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✍🏾 Youtube blocks advertisers from targeting "Black Lives Matter"

For a Markup feature, Leon Yin and Aaron Sankin compiled a list of
"social and racial justice terms" with help from Color of Change, Media
Justice, Mijente and Muslim Advocates, then checked if YouTube would let
them target those terms for ads.

https://themarkup.org/google-the-giant/2021/04/09/google-blocks-advertisers-from-targeting-black-lives-matter-youtube-videos

The results are (initially, at least), quite shocking: Youtube bans
advertisers from targeting videos using keywords like Black Lives
Matter, Black power, reparations, colonialism, antifascist, American
Muslim, and sex work.

Even worse: when the reporters asked Youtube for comment on these
blocks, the company stonewalled them, and then added even more terms to
the blocklist, including Black excellence, LGBTQ, antiracism, civil
rights, Black is beautiful, abolish ICE, believe Black women, queer,
Black trans lives matter, antiracism, Muslimfashion and many, many more.
The full data-set is on Github:

https://github.com/the-markup/investigation-youtube-ad-placements

As if that wasn't enough, there's the list of terms that Youtube *does*
allow ad-targeting on, including white power, white lives matter, white
power, etc.

The contradictions go further: you can advertise to "Christian
parenting" and "Jewish parenting" but not "Muslim parenting." Racist
terms like "white sharia" and "civilizational jihad" are in, too.

After Youtube was called for comment, they started blocking "Christian"
and "Jewish" as prefixes on the same keywords that were blocked when
associated with "Muslim."

Youtube's policies offer two explanations for this, the first ("[ads
should] ads to reflect a user’s interests rather than more personal
interpretations of their fundamental identity") is thoroughly
unconvincing. It's literally nonsense.

The second, though ("[targeting categories could be] used to stigmatize
an individual") is both hugely revealing and hugely incomplete, and
therein lies the tale.

https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/143465?hl=en#zippy=%2Ctroubleshooter-sexual-orientation-in-personalized-advertising

Youtube is caught in an unresolvable contradiction. On the one hand, you
have the company's statement that "At YouTube, we believe Black lives
matter and we all need to do more to dismantle systemic racism."

https://blog.youtube/inside-youtube/susan-wojcicki-my-mid-year-update-youtube-community

On the other hand, you have the platform's utility to reactionary,
racist, genocidal and eugenic communities who are totally in opposition
to Youtube's claimed support for racial justice.

Some of that is unwitting - the company can't possibly know what's in
all the videos published on its platform - and some is deliberate:
Youtube doesn't want to face the reputational, political and financial
consequences of cutting off superstars like Prageru.

They know if that if they allow advertisers to target "Black Lives
Matter," some of those ads will show up alongside of Prageru's racist
video, "'Black Lives Matter' Is Not Helping Blacks."

That's the heart of the contradiction. Sometimes, Youtube wants us to
think of its self-serve, algorithmic ad/publishing system as untouched
by human hands, an interplay of pure math, initiated and steered by
third parties whose choices are not Youtube's responsibility.

Other times, Youtube wants us to think of it as a corporate person, with
identities and values, priorities and ethics. The selective demand that
Youtube be considered a moral actor - but only for the outcomes that
reflect well on the company - leads to this contradiction.

To be clear, I don't think there's any way Youtube *could* operate a
self-serve ad platform or a self-serve video program that could
proactively identify racist outcomes.

It's not enough to vet every ad to make sure it's not racist - they'd
also have to vet every possible ad *placement* and make sure that it
doesn't violate its ethics; that is, they'd have to use reliable human
judgment to evaluate every single combination of ads and videos.

There isn't enough human judgement - let alone sound human judgement -
in existence to cover that combinatorial explosion. What's more, Youtube
is so consequential to our discourse that its errors would be - and are
- hugely consequential as well.

That's why all this matters: Youtube's editorial choice has the
foreseeable (and, evidently, acceptable to Youtube) outcome of producing
an economic boycott of the creators it says it wants to uplift and support.

Youtube's monopolistic dominance has the effect of making its
contradictions matters of civilizational importance.

It wants to be:

* Imperfect

* Moral

* Neutral

* Dominant

and

* Forgiven

It can't have all of those. It just can't.

And to be perfectly honest, I don't know what I want it to do here. I
mean, it could stop spinning idiotic tales about "[ads that] reflect a
user’s interests rather than more personal interpretations of their
fundamental identity," but that wouldn't fix things.

Likewise, it could ban the words "white" and "Christian" in association
with all same the keywords it blocks in connection with "Black" and
"Muslim," producing a kind of evenhanded idiocy, which is preferable to
a biased idiocy.

And it could be more transparent in its "brand safety" tactics, and have
some process for appealing bad choices, as Nandini Jammi - who cofounded
Check My Ads - sensibly calls for. They should do this, but it still
would leave the contradiction - and its consequences - intact.

Thinking about this stuff gives me a headache. On the other hand, it
reminded me to order a copy of SILICON VALUES, the new book from my EFF
colleague Jillian C York, who is far and away the content moderation
expert I trust most in this world.

http://siliconvaluesbook.com


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✍🏾 Alibaba's record-setting antitrust smackdown

China is in the midst of an antitrust surge, mustering the political
will to do something that western governments are still flinching away
from. This week, Alibaba was hit with a record-smashing $2.8b fine.

https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3129017/alibaba-antitrust-investigation-beijing-slaps-e-commerce-giant-record

The fine was the result into anticompetitive conduct on Alibaba's part -
conduct that forced small merchants to use its service in order to reach
the market for their goods, allowing Alibaba to extract a tax on an
appreciable slice of all ecommerce.

This wasn't just a matter of skimming rents from all transactions.
Alibaba's power included the power to shape markets: to decide what
would sell and what wouldn't, and to pick winners by and losers through
the editorial decisions embedded in its search-result ordering.

All of this turned Alibaba into a shadow government, creating a private,
unaccountable, opaque industrial policy that swayed what got produced
and consumed. For the economic planners of China's economy, this
represented the wrong kind of competition.

But as alarming as this kind of power is to central planners (and fans
of central planning), it should also alarm *opponents* of central
planning, the advocates for "market forces" as a means of determining
economic and production outcomes.

Through acquisitions, lock-in and other anticompetitive tactics, Alibaba
structured hundreds of markets for goods of all description, in China
and abroad, setting prices and favoring some production techniques over
others, on an arbitrary and self-preferencing basis.

It's quite an object lesson in the way that unregulated markets cease to
be markets altogether, transforming themselves into planned economies
whose architects are the board and executives of a few dominant firms.

Another interesting aspect of this affair is how Alibaba is dealing with
it. US companies that face antitrust fines typically admit no guilt,
insisting - even as they pay their fines - that they were done wrong.
Not Alibaba.

"[Alibaba] accepts the penalty with sincerity...To serve its
responsibility to society, Alibaba will operate in accordance with the
law with utmost diligence, continue to strengthen its compliance systems
and build on growth through innovation."

"Alibaba would not have achieved our growth without sound government
regulation and service, and the critical oversight, tolerance and
support from all of our constituencies have been crucial to our
development. For this, we are full of gratitude and respect."

This is just the first whack that Chinese regulators are taking at the
antitrust piñata, and they're promising to fine and smash *any* tech
giant that is big enough to constitute its own form of private economic
planning.

Antitrust in the West has been in a 40-year, Ronald-Reagan-designed
doldrums, and it's just waking up, with the opening salvoes aimed at
western Big Tech companies.

Big Tech is guilty of all the same sins as Chinese tech giants:
structuring markets and extracting rent through App Stores, Amazon
marketplace, Uber, Doordash, and all the other rentiers determined to
skim 30% off of all commerce that involves the internet.

In their defense, these companies quietly insist that they have to
maintain their scale and control if the west is to triumph in its
existential war against Chinese tech. Sometimes, they say the quiet part
aloud, as Zuckerberg did last summer:

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-antitrust-hearing-1034575/

It'll be interesting to see how they respond to China's moves. If China
is so ultra-competent that it represents a threat to other countries,
then what to make of the fact that the country sees domestic tech
monopolies as a threat to its dominance?

If China believes that the best way to further its national interests is
to shatter the corporate power of its domestic tech giants, then
shouldn't we take our own tech giants' claims to "national champion"
status with a boulder of salt?

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/03/ambulatory-wallets/#sectoral-balances

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✍🏾 This day in history

#20yrsago Stefan Jones’s guide to Vegas
https://web.archive.org/web/20020604175439/http://www.io.com/~stefanj/www/vegas.html

#20yrsago Mastercard threatens rec.humor.funny over satire
https://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/01/Apr/mcrhf.html

#10yrsago Canadian Tories’ campaign pledge: We will spy on the Internet
https://web.archive.org/web/20110412125250/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5733/125/

#10yrsago Canada’s New Democratic Party promises national broadband and
net neutrality
https://web.archive.org/web/20110412064952/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5734/125/

#5yrsago Boston Globe previews a front page from the Trump presidency
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2797782/Ideas-Trump-front-page.pdf

#1yrago Crisis makes heroes of IT workers
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/09/all-hail-morlocks/#morlocks

#1yrago Philips quadruples ventilator costs
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/09/all-hail-morlocks/#covidiens-revenge

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✍🏾 Colophon

Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/).

Currently writing:

* A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues." Yesterday's
progress: 1006 words (56048 total).

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: Past Performance is Not Indicative of Future Results
https://craphound.com/news/2021/03/28/past-performance-is-not-indicative-of-future-results/

Upcoming appearances:

* All the Teachable Things I Know About Writing, Apr 13,
https://www.changinghands.com/event/april2021/virtual-writing-workshop-cory-doctorow-all-teachable-things-i-know-about-writing

* Interop: Self-Determination vs Dystopia (FITC), Apr 19-21,
https://fitc.ca/presentation/interop/

* Book launch for Bruce Sterling's Robot Artists & Black Swans (Book
People), Apr 27,
https://www.bookpeople.com/event/virtual-event-bruce-sterling-robot-artists-black-swans

Recent appearances:

* The Right to Repair Movement, Monopolies, and Solarpunk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmosdDCrL-4

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https://anchor.fm/podsongs/episodes/Cory-Doctorow-on-the-Surveillance-State--digital-monopolies--and-why-we-should-be-worried-eso43k

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Latest book:

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* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet
analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a
solution.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59
(print edition:
https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907)
(signed copies:
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* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
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here:
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* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime,
gender, and kicking ass. Order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

Upcoming books:

* The Shakedown, with Rebecca Giblin, nonfiction/business/politics,
Beacon Press 2022

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