#1546

The Sunday Night Reader for 11/20/22

Nov 20, 2022

Hi, folks. I’ve paused billing for all of you with a paid subscription. I’d promised weekly newsletters, and it’s turned into something less frequent than that. You shouldn’t be billed from here on out. I’m going to keep sending but don’t need the self-imposed guilt of missing a week here and there. :) Thanks for reading.

Don’t Be Evil?

Big tech has many faults, and one of them is simply how big it is. No matter how smart they act, no matter how much they choose to trust their automated features, these are still human enterprises, and they routinely lose track of the details and let crucial problems slip through their nets. ProPublica’s investigation from last month illustrates this well.

“The company has publicly committed to fighting disinformation around the world, but a ProPublica analysis, the first ever conducted at this scale, documented how Google’s sprawling automated digital ad operation placed ads from major brands on global websites that spread false claims on such topics as vaccines, COVID-19, climate change and elections…The resulting ad revenue is potentially worth millions of dollars to the people and groups running these and other unreliable sites — while also making money for Google…

ProPublica used data provided by fact-checking newsrooms, researchers and website monitoring organizations to scan more than 13,000 active article pages from thousands of websites in more than half a dozen languages to determine whether they were currently earning ad revenue with Google. (To read a detailed breakdown of how ProPublica obtained and analyzed the data, see this accompanying article.)

The analysis found that Google placed ads on 41% of roughly 800 active online articles rated by members of the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network as publishing false claims about COVID-19. The company also served ads on 20% of articles about climate change that Science Feedback, an IFCN-accredited fact-checking organization, has rated false.

A number of Google ads viewed by ProPublica appeared on articles published months or years ago, suggesting that the company’s failure to block ads on content that appears to violate its rules is a long-standing and ongoing problem.

In one example, Google recently placed ads for clothing brand St. John on a two-year-old Serbian article falsely claiming that cat owners don’t catch COVID-19. Google placed an ad for the American Red Cross on a May 2021 article from a far-right German site that claimed COVID-19 is comparable in danger to the flu. An ad for luxury retailer Coach was recently attached to an April article in Serbian that repeated the false claim that the COVID-19 vaccines change people’s DNA.

Last August, the Greek edition of the Epoch Times, a far-right U.S. publication connected to the Falun Gong spiritual movement, published an article that falsely claimed the sun, and not increased levels of carbon dioxide, could be responsible for global warming. That story had multiple Google ads when ProPublica viewed it, even though it appears to clearly violate Google’s policy against climate disinformation…

A comparison with English-language outlets suggests Google is more rigorous in choosing its publisher partners in that language. ProPublica found Google placed ads on 13% of English-language websites that NewsGuard deemed unreliable for having repeatedly published false content or deceptive headlines and failing to meet transparency standards. In contrast, ProPublica’s analysis found anywhere from 30% to 90% of the sites most often flagged for false claims by fact-checkers in the non-English languages examined were monetizing with Google.” Read more.

Not Exactly Swift

For those of you who didn’t already see it on my FB page, live coverage of this week’s Ticketmaster fiasco from yours truly…Been buying concert tickets since you pulled your line number out of a fishbowl at the returns counter ticketmaster terminal in the back of a department store. Still feeling a mite of pressure getting tickets for the 14yo this morning. Wish me luck. TSwift-minus 11 minutes.

I long to see people in front of me. I want to smell the dead air of a still-closed mall. Instead, my soul has left my body and now lives in a digital queue somewhere in a data center that Amazon is running for ticketmaster.

Early Black Friday deals are whizzing past my head. VR lunatics from that 90s movie version of "Lawnmower Man" are laughing at me from the corner. Belarussian hackers are demanding my social security number in exchange for safe passage. I want to shake it off -- this electronic phantasm. To leave this blank space between life and the other side. But the tillerman, head cloaked, eyes glowing, bades me forward, across the Styx to whatever awaits. "You belong with me," he whispers.

TSwift-plus 38 and the "people ahead of you in the queue" stat has begun to tick down. 1818. Now, 1749. We stall at 1546. I wonder if I will ever see my family again. If I will be able to park at Cincinnati's Paycor Stadium for less than 40 bucks. If Jake Gyllenhaal really owns a million-dollar couch.

The Red Cross has arrived. But they're all Magritte's Son of Man. The Swifties around me beg to know whether they should refresh their browsers. The faceless men's only response is to pour green ones and zeros from the bowler hats that they have removed from their heads. The ones and zeros fall, passing through our hands but disappearing before they reach the ground. A ceaseless, inchoate rain of empty promises.

An hour and a half later, the queue has begun to move again. 1529. Some whisper of ticketmaster service fees being waved. Those of us who have seen other days, watched U2 fans seethe, heard the dot-matrix printers grind and break, we know these are just stories. Immutable, shared, and then gone.

A purple orb pulses in the distance. It sits on a tortoise's back, attended by ophanim spinning. Their eyes and flames blaze. A young man asks me if it is real. If it knows us. If it knows our devotion. "I can't say," I reply. He pats my shoulder, busses my cheeks, and walks on.

A chime sounds. Three tones, then silence. I enter the sanctum sanctorum. I buy the ticket limit, unsure why or where they will go. I depart moments later. Still not knowing what a "facility charge" is, but knowing myself a bit better for the journey.

Anywho, the 14yo's Christmas present is taken care of.

An Appreciation: Hostages

A handful of one-hour episodes on the Iran hostage crisis with fresh interviews from hostages, hostage takers, and Iranian officials. I turned four during the crisis and had never done a deep dive on the topic. Solid documentary television for those who haven’t either. A couple of things really struck me:

Horrible regimes come in all flavors. A murderous religious dictator stepped into the vacuum left by a murderous secular strongman.
Legal and moral aren’t the same thing. Constitutional sharia law was established during the revolution with a legitimate election. (There may be a ton of nuance there that I am missing. Willing to be educated on this point.) The ayatollah was a smart political operator and, by that measure anyway, won fair and square.
Things just get out of hand, fast. The ayatollah did not have clear control in Iran when the shah fled. The ayatollah didn’t instigate or, for some time, even support the student radicals that seized the American embassy. The ayatollah took advantage of what was happening on the ground, read which way the wind was blowing, and played his hand well. A flap of a butterfly’s wings could have sent things in any number of other directions.