Google "took down 2.7bn bad ads." But why were they put up?

“

He went out to get his hair cut and he never came home.”

Those simple words conveyed a world of pain for Dublin man Mick Morrissey as he recounted to RTE’s Joe Duffy recently how his 15-year-old son needlessly died.

The likely culprit, according to Mick, is nitrous oxide – laughing gas - bought online for “next to nothing”  used by thousands of teenagers to ‘get high’ during the lockdown.

“My local parks in have become littered with (these) strange, shiny, silver bullets,” said Fine Gael Dublin Mid-West TD Emer Higgins after the tragedy.”People were shocked  that these are the residue of a new drug abuse craze among young people."

 While not linking internet search engine Google to Mr Morrissey’s death, Ms Higgins criticised it for “profiting from the sale of this drug” after she researched how it suddenly proliferated. 

“Google is showing search results clearly marked as ‘sponsored’ when certain key words are used to search for the drug. The tech giant is blatantly profiteering by displaying these prominent shopping ads and, by extension, facilitating the abuse of this potentially lethal drug,” Ms Higgins said.

When we asked Google why they advertise harmful products and fraud, they replied that they have “robust policies and procedures in place for dealing effectively with harmful content.”

But the spokesperson also added: “In 2019, our team took down approximately 2.7 billion bad ads—that’s more than 10M ads per day and 5,000 bad ads taken down per minute.”

That’s a lot of work, sure…

But should they put up so many “bad ads” in the first place?

And how much harm can 2,700,000,000 ‘bad ads’ do before they are taken down?!

Digital giants like Google -  fined $500m for facilitating the sale of illegal drugs online in the US in 2010 - are in the spotlight as the EU updates online laws that go back to 1999 in a new Digital Services Act.

“The  Act will be a hugely important initiative to modernise the European online environment and provide safety and protection for consumers and citizens,” said MEP and former Justice Minister Francis Fitzgerald.

The BEUC, a confederation of European consumer groups, has also just released a report on the Act spotlighting concern over on-line sales processes.

“Recently, six BEUC members organisations found that out of 250 products bought on online marketplaces, two thirds violated safety rules. And this is just one test out of many,” said Maryant Fernández Pérez, senior digital policy officer with the BEUC.

“One of the major problems is that marketplaces do not consider themselves to be liable for the safety of products sold on their platforms and therefore do not seem to sufficiently control the trustworthiness of sellers upfront.”

Scams are also openly advertised online.

“Recent research by our British member Which? showed that because of a lack of effective controls on Facebook and Google fraudsters can create and post fake adverts to target victims and spread misinformation within a matter of hours,” Ms Fernández Pérez said.

Reports of investment scams soared by 45 per cent over the lockdown, with 1,600 cases recorded in June, by UK-based agency Action Fraud. Con artists lure in often older savers through paid-for advertising slots on Google and social media sites, it said.

Recently we also highlighted how a €60m Ukraine-based scam targeting the elderly extracted sums ranging from €50 to €70,000 from thousands of people with lies, harassment and intimidation, facilitated by paid-for ads on Facebook.

“The COVID-19 crisis has seen a big rise in cyber fraud, which shows that criminals are adapting to exploit the chaos of the pandemic. Unfortunately vulnerable people are often the target of such fraud,”  Ms Fitzgerald said.

So how can digital companies get away with effectively profiting from crime? 

“Under the current EU legal framework, digital or online platforms are not legally responsible for hosting illegal content, but are required to remove such material once it is flagged,” explains Ms Fitzgerald.

That may change with the introduction of Digital Services Act, although what exactly it will contain is still up for discussion (see article below to see how you can have your say).

“A key demand for us is thus to upgrade liability rules to bring more accountability in the industry,” Ms Fernández Pérez said.

The BEUC report calls for “additional regulatory obligations on platforms…as self-regulation is proving ineffective and insufficient.”

The BEUC also wants to see online marketplaces held “liable upon obtaining credible evidence of illegal activities.”

 But updating laws won’t do any good unless they are enforced. And MEP Clare Daly identified a blind spot in this area.

Illegal activities online need to be tackled with the same energy as illegal activities offline, she said.

And “that's what's been missing to date. What's also been missing is streamlined co-operation between national authorities and better cross-border enforcement tools.”

 Another thing missing from the behaviour of digital giants was pointed out by actor Sasha Baron Cohen in a speech to the Anti Defamation League late last year: “These companies... are the largest publishers in history. And here’s an idea for them: abide by basic standards and practices just like newspapers, magazines and TV news do every day.”

COMMENT

It’s easy to see why digital giants are reluctant to change the business models: they make an extraordinary amount of money from them.

Despite mounting criticism over how companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google  operate, their shares just keep soaring, even during the Covid-19 global recession.

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brinn saw their collective wealth rose by an extra $112 billion so far this year.  

Mr Bezos gained €11 billion on Monday alone, setting a new daily record for personal enrichment on the stock market.

Coronavirus may have upended the world economy - but it has turbocharged the use of internet-based services.

However, not everyone is uncomfortable with the way digital giants can make what seems obscene amounts of money from a business model that can facilitate fraud and the sale of illegal and shoddy products,

If the world were a village, and, increasingly, it is, Jeff his pals would be like shopkeepers suspected of dubious practices flaunting extreme wealth in front of their increasingly impoverished fellow-villagers.

As many people struggle to pay their mortgages, Mr Bezos, for example, has just splashed out $16m on a new three bedroom pad in Manhattan – not as a home but merely to extend his existing $80m property in the same building.

As these ‘shopkeepers’ swan past their customers’ old bangers in Rolls Royces and Mazaratis, the villagers are beginning to wonder how they can earn such a ridiculous amount of money? Are they fulfilling their part of the ‘social contract’ by paying their fair share of tax? And is the way they do business entirely fair and equitable?

And the more they look into it, the more angry they get when the answer to both questions appears to be a resounding ‘no’.

We all appreciate the cheapness and extraordinary variety of goods and services they bring to the market - thanks to the economies of scale of their global internet-based business model.

But there is a dark side. They pry into our most intimate secrets in order to target us with products. They facilitate the sale of shoddy and often illegal goods. They profit from criminal gangs advertising drugs for sale to teenagers and scams that steal money from vulnerable older people while proclaiming that it has ‘nothing to do with them.’

They employ relatively few staff to properly screen what they sell for legality and quality.

In the real world, all this would never happen. No shopkeeper or service provider would get away with such behaviour. National laws and common decency prevent it. But this is not the real world. It’s a virtual and, so far, largely-unregulated global and often unseen world where digital corporations can avoid taxes, sidestep national laws and even ignore basic ethics to further inflate profits.

And because they're not held to account for their content, including even ads, they can employ relatively few people to screen it, further boosting their profits.

Meanwhile, there are ever-fewer jobs, increasing disaffection and fuelling political movements like populism and fascism. Autocratic rulers are on the rise and liberal democracies torn apart as people blame globalization - immigration and open markets - for getting left behind when job-killing technology is largely responsible. 

Ironically, most economists agree that shutting down markets and immigration will only make us even poorer. But the same digital axis partly responsible for these changes is also spreading disinformation, paid-for propaganda and downright lies. The twin phenomena of Trump and Brexit were fuelled by data and targeted advertising sold by Facebook.

Now, we have a once-in-a-decade chance to put things right. The world may be a global village without global laws but we can at least start to police the street where we live – the European Union.

And that street is big and bold enough to take on Big Tech. The EU’s digital laws date back to 1999 when the world was a very different place and changes come at a glacial pace. But they are now being rewritten in an upcoming Digital Services Ac (DSA)t, which may or may not call Mssrs Bezos, Zuckerberg, Page and Brinn to account depending on how it is drawn up.

The EU is consulting citizens on how far the DSA should go. You can find out make a contribution if you want at https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/consultation-digital-services-act-package. They are particularly interested to hear if you have practical examples of fraud or online content that disturbed you.

We also have 11 MEPs – two more since Brexit - making an EU representation 1.68 times more than the average (smaller countries get a bigger proportional say). You can find their contact details at: www.europarl.europa.eu/ireland/en/your-meps.

The Irish Mail On Sunday contacted all 11 MEPS and received a response  from four: Barry Andrews, Dierdre Clune, Clare Daly and Frances Fitzgerald.

"The Parliament will be involved throughout the entire legislative process and will consider all views,” said Ms Clune who sits on  IMCO (Internal Market and Consumer Protection) committee of MEPS.  "From my part I want to see a harmonised approach ensuring clear obligations for digital service providers including online intermediaries in areas such as consumer protection ,Illegal content and safety on line.”

The  public consultation opened on this on June 20 and you have until September 8th 2020 to make a contribution, even if it is just to recount a personal experience. "I would encourage your readers to make a submission if they can,” said MEP Barry Andrews.

So yes, you can have your say. 

Don’t let it go to waste.