Google has made certain pledges over the years and one of them for
a very long time has been that they will not do gun advertisements,
they will not make money off of advertising for guns.
But ProPublica has looked into this and
has figured out that in some areas they have maintained that.
But they are very much making money thanks to these advertisements and
we wanna run through a little bit of what they found.
The full report is available at ProPublica.
You can see that.
So back in 2004, the co founder of Google surgery Britain said that the policy of
not doing these advertisements was a matter of ethics and
a reflection of the companies don't be evil corporate value.
That was the thing that they said at one point.
ProPublica analysis though,
found that the 15 of the largest firearms sellers in the US.
This includes by the way, Daniel Defense, the company that made the specific
AR-15 made by the Uvalde gunmen used Google systems to place ads that
generated over 120 million impressions from just March 9th to June 6.
So this is not a very small bit.
They generated so much attention off of this and that generated money for Google.
All of those impressions led to ad revenue directly contradicting their pledge.
So you might be wondering,
well they're not owning up to the fact that they violated.
So how exactly does that work?
Well it gets slightly tricky, but let's see if we can follow along in this.
Google has two sets of rules for weapons ads, one is for google ads,
the ads that run on the company's own ad network and
on properties it owns like YouTube or Google.com search results.
The other system is for
Ads sold by partners such as Ad exchanges that place ads using Google systems.
Ad exchanges enable digital ads to be bought and
sold via an automated bidding process.
Now. For the second category,
for those partners, Google operates as an exchange of exchanges in which it
facilitates the buying and selling of ads on other exchanges.
That's how it actually makes its money.
Those particular exchanges are guided by a set of more permissive rules.
And so that's all tricky legalese or
whatever like it's the terms of service I guess.
At the end of the day though,
they're making money by helping gun manufacturers advertise.
They can cloud it in as much complicated nuance and talk as they want, but
they're making money for gun manufacturers to get more eyeballs and sell more guns.
It's really as simple as that.
>> Yeah. I think the ProPublica report says it
all in that part where it says Google has two sets of rules for weapons sales.
Yeah.
Now, if you really care about something and you care about the ethics behind your
advertising model, you don't inherently have two sets of rules.
You have one set of rules for everything.
And yeah,
it's interesting the breakdown of how the report goes on to explain how this works.
It sounds like a mid level marketing scheme or something like that.
It literally sounds like those pyramid scheme that's like how the top earners
get off scot free from whatever bad nefarious things are happening to
the people below them.
Yeah, and I'm curious if you are bringing up like what really creeps
me out about this report was the retargeting part about how, so
I'm sure we're all familiar and I think it's called retargeting.
Yeah, when you search something on Google and
then ads for that thing just keep popping up and popping up.
Yeah.
And so that apparently is a big problem with this where people will either
look up a gun and on a website.
And then they'll just be in their usual internet activity and
constantly see retargeting ads of firearms.
And that to me is like one of the most abhorrent things that I can
possibly imagine because as so many of us know, because we live
in a gun obsessed country is that suicide rates from guns are incredibly high.
There're so many gun deaths that you know, let alone the mass shootings.
But one of the things that you can see this policy being murderous is that
if you are in a weak moment or something.
And you look up how to get a firearm and then you take a step back,
you take a breath, you talk to friends and families, whatever.
And then you are haunted by the continuous imagery of guns on your internet.
Like that is so insane to me and Google totally bears responsibility for that.
I don't care if it's some loophole or whatever.
But that really is such a sad part to me,
like how many people have been in their worst moments searching for something.
And then that thing keeps haunting them.
It's despicable.
>> That's a great point.
Honestly, I had never thought about that specifically.
We've all been followed by ads like I would have,
I looked up a board game and then I just got ads about it for like three months.
I already bought the game, you should really stop sending.
I already bought it, you know that I bought it, I bought it online.
That's annoying.
Or they've apparently online they've sketched a psychological profile
of me where they offer up Instagram ads for really Douchey shirts and jackets.
I don't buy them but
they seem to think you're on the precipice of buying this Douchey shirt.
But think about it when it's a gun and
I'm sure you can come up with other examples of things that you really
do not want following someone literally everywhere they go.
And that gets outside of just the bounds of this on guns, but it's a great point.
And look, we can show you like places that gun ads were being served up,
but it's just ridiculous.
So the gun makers savage arms definitely manufacturer of guns for
responsible gun owners, savage arms.
Anyway, their ads popped up on the site, baby games amid games for children.
That's cool, on an article about how to handle teen drama.
Wonderful.
Ads for clock pistols loaded on a recipe sites list of the 50 best vegetarian
recipes in case you have to shoot a rutabaga I guess.
As well as on the quiz site, Playbuzz on Merriam Webster,
the Denver Post, you can see a shot actually right here,
I think that's like fun little games and stuff like that.
That's babygames.com and tactical vests and what looks like, I don't know,
there's like self defense weapons, you're supposed to poke in someone's eye.
So that's a cool message to put to the kids, so very fun.
And by the way, full disclosure, we obviously, we have a business relationship
with Google in that you might be watching this on YouTube right now.
We make some money off of ads and everything.
but it is still, we have an ethical responsibility to criticize them when
they're advertising like obligations are not living up to them,
which clearly in this case they're not.
Even if they hadn't made the pledge, this is wrong.
You shouldn't do this.
But especially when you decades ago pledged that to do this would be evil,
then we're gonna have to hold you to it.
>> Yeah, it's nothing new in these corporate ethics statements.
I feel like at this point we all sort of know that they're entirely hollow if it
actually affects their bottom line.
So that's what we have to wait and see.
If this generates press or publicity about the fact that Google is doing this,
hopefully that's enough for them to stop this.
But if it is increasing their revenue, if it's good for
their bottom line, I don't see any version of them walking back on this.
>> Maybe not.
I mean, the hope would be that of all of the huge amount of money that they make
off advertising.
This might be a small enough part that they would be willing to change the rules
for that second.
>> But even that it's like, cool, cool ethics statement.
>> Yeah, that's not really ethics so much but I guess we'll see