Comment by craftkiller
5 hours ago
I've noticed on YouTube I see a lot of adult sexual ads. Things like home cleaning ads that have an unmistakable wood-grain image of fellatio. I've always wondered "how are these getting past the moderators?". I guess the answer is the obvious one: no one is moderating anything.
Google Play Store showed my child an ad of a bloody body on a bed for a murder mystery game. The game was rated 18+ and the account had my daughter’s correct single digit age.
I reported the ad and a week later it was still there. I switched to Apple.
Listen, we need you to verify your identity in order for us to not serve these ads to your kids. It's very important that you do this.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen MA ads for kids games on iPhone as well. Possibly not as bad but not great. It seems to be better than it was two years ago.
How did that work out for you? Safer? What was the experience switching, for you and for your kid?
Haven’t seen any bloody bodies advertised to my child… yet.
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Yet you can’t run Linux on a Chromebook with a minor child user.
Reported an obvious sexual ad the other day and got a very AI generated response that started with "Dear Username" stating that they reviewed the ad and found nothing wrong with it.
Before I gave up on Facebook entirely, I reported an ad that was an explicit blow job and received a similar response and this was before AI was huge. I really don't think they've ever cared.
Facebook literally trolls you when you report criminal activity, rampant well-documented scams, on their site. They write back and tell you it's not violating their policy and ask if you want to support for your personal problem.
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The Dead Internet Theory is real!
The other answer is that the people creating these ads have the resources to continuously try and bypass filters/moderation.
If there is filters/moderation.
There are, but only for using IP of large corporations. If you put 12 seconds of a major label song in your video review of an album, that video belongs to the major label now.
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There are basically always filters of some kind, though not necessarily the ones we want. The bigger the target that filter represents, the more effort is spent breaking it.
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But that can't be true! From the article (with a probably irrelevant fact added by me):
I just don't get their algorithm. I used to show YT videos to my students but I stopped that totally because of this kind of crap.
Use the unhook extension, ublock origin extension and firefox. Also don't hesitate to use the "Block element" feature for ublock. Get some control back from big tech :)
Man I got a “clothing brand” last night on YouTube of a VERY young girl wearing… not much, and it didn’t fit well in all the wrong / revealing places…
Reported the add but damn YouTube, the freaky fake medical ads are bad enough.
The more surprising thing with YouTube is how much obvious copyright infringement is in ads. The whole platform seems oriented around copyright enforcement, but ads seem to get a pass.
There have been Youtube ads that are undeniable scams for years, so it's no surprise it's compleatly unmoderated.
The worst ads are the shady games with all sorts of sexual references. They don't end no matter how many times you report it, block the ads or select the "less gaming ads" option.
Is it surprising? Google and Facebook can barely police the content their human users post.