Google's Search Quality in Steady Decline

Google's search quality has been in steady decline for years, and Google assures us that they're working on it, though the most visible effort is replacing links to webpages with lengthy, florid paragraphs written by a confident habitual liar chatbot:https://t.co/ODoa3BW4J9

1/ pic.twitter.com/PvHoDHCpye

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

But not all categories of paid disinformation are equally bad: it's one thing to pay a 15% surcharge on a takeout meal, but there's a whole universe of paid *medical* disinformation that Google knows about and has an official policy of tolerating.

21/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

This paid medical disinformation comes from "#CrisisPregnancyCenters": these are fake #AbortionClinics that raise huge sums from religious fanatics to buy ads that show up for people seeking information about procuring an abortion.

22/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

If they are duped by one of these ads, they are directed to a Big Con-style storefront staffed by people who pretend that they perform abortions, but who bombard their marks with falsehoods about health complications.

23/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

These con artists try to trick their marks into consenting to sexual assault - a transvaginal ultrasound. This is a prelude to another fraud, in which the "sporadic electrical impulses" generated by an early fetal structure is a "heartbeat."

24/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

(Early fetuses do not have hearts, so they cannot produce heartbeats):https://t.co/0Ni6vSExov

25/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

If the victim still insists on getting an abortion, the fraudsters will use deceptive tactics to draw out the process until they run out the clock for a legal abortion, procuring a forced birth through deceit.

26/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

It is hard to imagine a less ethical course of conduct. Google's policy of accepting "crisis pregnancy center" ads is the moral equivalent of taking money from fake oncologists who counsel people with cancer to forego chemotherapy in favor of juice-cleanses.

27/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

There is no ambiguity here: the *purpose* of a "crisis prengancy center" is to deceive people seeking abortions into thinking they are dealing with an abortion clinic.

28/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

They then further deceive them into foregoing the abortion, by means of lies, sexually invasive and unnecessary medical procedures, and delaying tactics.

29/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

Now, a new report from the @CCDHate finds that Google made $10m last year on ads from "crisis pregnancy centers":https://t.co/osoItVi5bq

30/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

Many of these "crisis pregnancy centers" are also registered 501(c)3 charities, which makes them eligible for Google's ad grants, which provide free ads to nonprofits.

31/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

Marketers who cater to "crisis pregnancy center" advertise that they can help their clients qualify for these grants. In 2019, Google was caught giving tens of thousands of dollars' worth of free ads to "crisis pregnancy centers":https://t.co/pCwHSUYGNW

32/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

The keywords "crisis pregnancy centers" bid up include "Planned Parenthood" - meaning that if Planned Parenthood clinics wanting to appear at the top of the search for "planned parenthood," must to outbid the fraudsters seeking to deceive Planned Parenthood patients.

33/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

Google has an official policy of requiring customers that pay for ads matching abortion-related search terms to label their ads to state whether or not they provide abortions, but the report documents failures to enforce this policy.

34/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

The labels themselves are confusing: for example, abortion travel funds have to be labeled as "not providing abortions."

35/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

Google isn't afraid to ban whole categories of advertising: for example, Google has banned #PlanC, a nonprofit that provides information about medication abortions. The company erroneously classes Plan C as an "unauthorized pharmacy."

36/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

But Google continues to offer paid disinformation on behalf of #ForcedBirth groups that claim there is such a thing as "#AbortionReversal" (there isn't - but the "abortion reversal" drug cocktail is potentially lethal).

37/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

This is inexcusable, but it's not unique - and it's not even that profitable. $10m is a drop in the bucket for a company like Google. When you're lighting $45b/year on fire just to prevent competition, $10m is chump change.

38/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

A better way to understand Google's relationship to paid disinformation can be found by studying #Facebook's own paid disinformation problem.

39/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

Facebook has a well-documented problem with paid political disinformation - unambiguous, illegal materials, like paid notices advising people to remember to vote on November 6th (when election day falls on November 5th).

40/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

The company eventually promised to put political ads in a repository where they could be inspected by all parties to track its progress in blocking paid disinformation.

41/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

Facebook did a *terrible* job at this, with huge slices of its political ads never landing in its transparency portal.

42/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

We know this because independent researchers at NYU's engineering school built an independent, crowdsourced tracker called #AdObserver, which scraped all the ads volunteers saw and uploaded them to a portal called #AdObservatory.

43/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

Facebook viciously attacked the NYU project, falsely smearing it as a privacy risk (the plugin was open source and was independently audited by #Mozilla researchers, who confirmed that it didn't collect any personal information).

44/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

When that didn't work, they sent a stream of legal threats, claiming that NYU was trafficking in a "circumvention device" as defined by #Section1201 of the #DigitalMillenniumCopyrightAct, a felony carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine - for a first offense.

45/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

Eventually, NYU folded the project. Facebook, meanwhile, has fired or reassigned most of the staff who work on political ad transparency:https://t.co/vAfQDLH8MB

46/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

What are we to make of this? Facebook claims that it doesn't need or want political ad revenue, which are a drop in the bucket and cause all kinds of headaches.

47/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

That's likely true - but Facebook's aversion to blocking political ads doesn't extend to spending a lot of money to keep paid political disinfo off the platform.

48/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

The company *could* turn up the sensitivity on its blocking algorithm, which would generate more false positives, in which nonpolitical ads are misidentified and have to be reviewed by humans.

49/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

This is expensive, and it's an expense Facebook can avoid if it can suppress information about its failures to block paid political disinformation. It's cheaper to silence critics than it is to address their criticism.

50/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

I don't think Google gives a shit about the $10m it gets from fake abortion clinics. I think Google believes the PR trouble it would get into for blocking them - and the expense it would incur in trying to catch and block fake abortion clinic ads - are real liabilities.

51/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

In other words, it's not about the $10m it would lose by blocking the ads - Google wants to avoid the political heat it would take from forced birth fanatics and cost of the human reviewers who would have to double-check rejected ads.

52/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023

In other words, Google doesn't abet fraudulent abortion clinics because they share the depraved sadism of the people who run these clinics. Rather, Google teams up with these sadists out of cowardice and greed.

53/

— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 15, 2023