Here's the thing though. That doesn't matter.

Whether it's malicious or not, Google created this ecosystem where you need to process and serve a bazillion ads to compete with them, if they're unable to properly vet those ads it's on them to scale back to a size where they can properly vet them.

If this was a one-off issue then sure - but Google runs a lot of really slimy advertisements.

Yeah - beyond political issues they also just outright advertise pyramid schemes. I live in Hong Kong and most of the adverts here are for a clearly fraudulent scheme that advertises by having young women screaming and showing a bank balance on a phone.

It's pretty telling that even small-ish video producers are willing to vet their advertising partners more thoroughly.

I think it does matter, because a decentralised system would have much greater problems moderating content than Google does today. If this was coming from the Belarusian government bidding for ad time on thousands of peertube instances and the response was piecemeal requests to each federated instance's admin team, then it would also take a very long time to remove from the system as a whole. It might well be impossible to remove it from every popular instance.

A better solution is for Google to hire more people to help with moderation. It's just that Google doesn't want to spend more money, it wants to make more profit.

> but this is literally just a case of "nobody paying serious attention" rather than outright malice.

Hate to break it to you, but that is how most evil in the world works-- through callous indifference and incompetence, not through some cartoon villain.

> this is literally just a case of "nobody paying serious attention" rather than outright malice

That's always been the case and it still doesn't matter. It would matter if this was an isolated thing that happened every once in a while, but the outcome has been the same, which makes it not matter when it's been going on for so long.

Except (if the allegations in the tweet are true) the issue has been brought to YouTube’s attention. It’s hard to plead innocent inadvertent ignorance if you were specifically put on notice.

That's the disgusting thing about it.