Google is pressuring the economy-oriented site Naked Capitalism to either censor its content to Google’s liking, or lose ad revenue.
This case of demonetization is of particular interest because the tech giant is believed to be enlisting AI for censorship. Another is that the size of the independent site means it can ill, if at all, afford to lose any money.
And this might inform how it approaches reporting going forward – including the possibility of censorship giving rise to self-censorship.
In early March, Naked Capitalism editor, Yves Smith, got a letter from the ad firm the site works with that warned of Google flagging it and restricting ads on pages marked for violent extremism, hateful content, harmful health claims, and anti-vaccination.
This, as the ad service explained, was only the first step: if the flags continue to be placed on the pages but the content is not “fixed” (i.e., censored) – then the ads will go away and the site would be completely demonetized, as Smith put it.
One of the flags concerns a review of the book penned by CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson, “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire.”
And that, Matt Taibbi writes, is because AI-powered censorship had a hard time telling whether Trump was being rejected or endorsed here. As for whether AI of some description is in fact involved, Smith said she was told by an expert in ad sales that “no human is flagging these posts.”
Posting last week on Naked Capitalism, Smith focused on the “systematically” flawed and sometimes absurd nature of the flags against 16 pages posted since 2018, but also to note, citing conversations with experts, that, “whatever Google is doing here, it is not for advertisers.”
For context, Smith explained that the site is threatened with full demonetization because of just over a dozen flagged posts that make up under 0.1 percent of the site’s overall content (some 33,000 posts).
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