The Google announced a novelty to try to minimize hate speech on the Internet. The company has decided to block several terms that can no longer be used as keywords for video ads on YouTube . The move follows a report by The Markup, which found that advertisers look for terms like “white lives matter” and “white power” to market their brands on the platform.
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In a brief Google search, you can find hundreds of millions of videos from channels related to “ white supremacy ” and other hateful terms, including “All Lives Matter” and “White Lives Matter” – phrases used as rejoinders to the famous “ Black Lives Matter” (“Black Lives Matter”, in Portuguese).
The Markup also found that the company was banning advertisers from using “ Black Lives Matter ” as a keyword. Questioned, Google said it blocked other terms of racial and social justice, such as “black excellence” and “civil rights.”
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A spokesman for the search platform told the international press that “the company condemns and takes issues of hate and harassment very seriously.” He acknowledged that “the identified terms are offensive and harmful, so they were blocked for violating company policies.”
On the other hand, YouTube has stated that it has multiple layers of protection to prevent offensive or harmful ads and that it regularly removes videos that contain incitement to hate. Last year, the company excluded more than 867 million ads that tried to “escape” from detection systems and more than 3 billion that violated its policies.
Google has been fighting hate speech for several years. In 2019, some content linked to the “white supremacy” movement was banned. The company has restricted channels from monetizing videos that go against its hate speech policies, preventing them from running advertisements. According to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, “The company’s anti-hate speech policy prohibits videos claiming that one group is superior to another based on qualities such as race, gender, religion or sexual orientation, in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion”.
Source: The Verge
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