Should we try to coin the term:

"Beer's Razor"

The purpose of a system is what it does...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does

Twice I have tried to report this one, here's their response:

Here's what we found

We decided not to take this ad down. **We found that the ad doesn’t go against Google’s policies,** which prohibit certain content and practices that we believe to be harmful to users and the overall online ecosystem.

If it wasn't for youtube and my 20 year old gmail account i wouldn't be using anything from them

Amazing how many people rather argue away the obvious using Hanlon's Razor, than face reality. Let's adhere to a much better reasoning tool, "allways follow the money!"

I've seen my niece and her friends get incredibly sexual ads on their YT before. Taught them both how to install adblock even on an iPhone and managed to make them not see that shit anymore. Mind you, my niece and her friends are FOURTEEN!

I felt like such an adult when they were getting excited that Fandom didn't have ads anymore when I showed them what a DNS sinkhole is. This is what it means to be an adult. To use your wisdom to help the new generation navigate theirs.

I just reported an ad that used a national newspaper name and logo to send you to a fake Amazon page that uses Amazon name and logo. Google's response: "We decided not to take this ad down. We found that the ad doesn’t go against Google’s policies"

Two thoughts :

1. This particular example of adversarial advertising is directly targeting a competitor
2. The author asks why Google aren't using their AI tools to combat these, which is a fair question. Surely they are using AI, of course, but no chance in hell are they using the same Gemini the public gets. It's going to be tailored to their ends, not the public-facing model the author interacted with.

Because that makes them money. Next question.

This is really only an issue if you browse the WWW without adblock.

And it seems that this guy does it on a mobile device, which is the second mistake.

Because they're blood soaked assholes who would be facing very uncomfortable consequences if there was justice in the world.

Because the US refuses to regulate tech

Why wouldn't they?

It's not like they face any consequences for being accessory to fraud. Laws are for poor people.

I have personalized ads turned of in YouTube and it seems half the ads are for gambling as of late.

Because Google's corporate philosophy is "Anything for a buck" which is of course quite different from the "Dont Be Evil" they started with...

#1 money/greed
#2 ineffective government

Growing up you’re told “If it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense” and I think that sums up the answer to this question.

Because like all ad companies, Google gives way less of a shit if the ads are malicious than they do there being lots of ads displayed.

Before I put adblockers on everything, I was served an ad for a stupid mobile shooter game, either on YouTube or Facebook, that started with a real life hunter shooting a coyote in the neck, which made it cry out in pain and tumble down a hill.

Now as a matter of sanity, I block all ads. If they can't keep crap like that from being advertised, then fuck off.

Money. Criminals and immoral people pay good money to show these ads. At least for Facebook, a court case regarding identity fraud has established that they knew quite well which ads were fishy, so they just charged those advertisers more. If I remember correctly, that amounted to about 10% of Facebook's revenue. It will be a similar case for Google, I assume. Sketchy ads pay too well to remove all of them and laws make it so the platform is only liable if they don't take it down after receiving notice of every single sketchy ad. Google, Facebook, and the others are all well near monopoly and built deep moats, so they don't really have to fear losing customers, because there's no simple alternative.

Huh? Not for me. I kicked the big G out with DNS.