A) Advertisers request content changes before showing advertising is not forcing you to not have that content, just saying you have to do that if you want their advertising. Why support Google's ad business?
B) Here's a spreadsheet of complaints - if we look at this one last entry, it's not right therefore "Google's demand is capricious, arbitrary, and demonstrably false" is quite the hilarious leap.
Based on it's own logic I think I now have more than enough bad faith argument examples to consider this site "capricious, malicious and demonstrably false"
30 years ago all respected news organizations had a strict separation between ads and content. The ad side was not allowed to tell the news side what to publish. either you buy an ad, or you don't, but never would the ad side tell the news side why someone pulled ads.
Manufacturing Consent appeared almost 40 years ago, and it complains about the exact same kind of influence. News organizations have always been highly dependent on ads (at least the ones that weren't dependent on being some magnate's vanity rag), so the reality is that they have always been deeply aware of how to avoid making the ads people too angry with the news they publish.
Maybe today they are more brazen in this intermingling, but it has always been there.
The real difference is back then they would push back: do you want to reach the people who follow us or not.
Of course back then ads were sold in house. You didn't have the powerful middleman who could afford to say no to just you. (there were such middlemen, but they were not as powerful as most ads were in house)
I had the same initial reaction as you, but steel-manning I think it makes sense that they wrote it awkwardly. I still think they're being overly dismissive and reactionary, but given this affects their income they are probably a little justified in receiving this bot-driven algorithmic bad news poorly.
I'm guessing they mean something like, "let's look at the case with everything in the book on it and see if it's valid. It's not valid, therefore this is capricious and arbitrary". For that to work, I'm also assuming that they aren't software engineers and don't understand how ML and Google work. They might even be thinking that there is a human reviewing their site and giving that determination. If you think that it was a human, I could definitely see where you'd find it capricious and arbitrary.
But on that note actually I just touched one of my own nerves. Maybe we should be holding them to the "human" standard. I am abolutely sick of living in the algorithmic world where some algorithm makes a decision about me and I'm stuck with the fallout of that decision with no recourse. I think we need to start considering bot activity from a company as the same level of liability as a human.
> I'm also assuming that they aren't software engineers and don't understand how ML and Google work
NC has superior tech journalism to most dedicated "tech journalism" outlets. Yves et al have been sounding the alarm on algorithmic rulemaking sans human intervention for some time.
>But on that note actually I just touched one of my own nerves. Maybe we should be holding them to the "human" standard. I am abolutely sick of living in the algorithmic world where some algorithm makes a decision about me and I'm stuck with the fallout of that decision with no recourse. I think we need to start considering bot activity from a company as the same level of liability as a human.
I sometimes take on a very uncharitable view of Big Tech and its focus on scale: they want all the power and profit of technological force-multipliers, without extending any responsibility and humanity for what it brings. I don't think it's unreasonable at all to expect well-resourced organizations like Google to invest in mitigating the externalities and edge cases their scale naturally imposes on the world. The alternative is basically letting a sociopathic toddler run wild with a flamethrower.
B) Here's a spreadsheet of complaints - if we look at this one last entry, it's not right therefore "Google's demand is capricious, arbitrary, and demonstrably false" is quite the hilarious leap.
Based on it's own logic I think I now have more than enough bad faith argument examples to consider this site "capricious, malicious and demonstrably false"