Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Rules:
1: All Lemmy rules apply
2: Do not post low effort posts
3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff
4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.
5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist
7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed
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I don't think there's anything normal or acceptable about a private entity acting as a gatekeepr to the internet and deciding what content people can see based on their own opaque reasons.
No one needs to pay to put ads next to content they don’t agree with. Google is informing them that advertisers don’t want their ads on these pages. They don’t have to remove the pages, thereby not being censored, they’d just suffer the consequence of not getting ad revenue.
Google has become the main way people find content online, and if content doesn't show up in search results then it's effectively censored. The consequence here is that advertisers decide what content is acceptable. Again, this is very clearly a big problem for society.
This has nothing to do with search. Just advertising. They’ll remain in search results as long as they don’t take the page down and remain otherwise complaint with search policies.
Google's search algorithm is equally opaque and almost certainly driven by advertisers as well. This is a well known problem.