When Assemblymember Steven Cymbrowitz (D-Sheepshead Bay, Manhattan Beach, Brighton Beach) saw a Polish government advertisement on the Kings County Politics website earlier this week he immediately fired off a letter to Google protesting its appearance, which sent the publisher in me into damage control.
The ad appeared via Google Adsense – ads delineated with a small Aqua-colored triangle in their upper right corner. Google, through a take it or leave it partnership deal with small web publishers such as myself, pay pennies on the dollar to place these ads on our sites. They are placed utilizing a combination of algorithms gleaned from both the publisher and the user, through personal and business information gathered from its near monopoly of a search engine, and other technology properties they control.
The ad Cymbrowitz was protesting defends a recent law passed in Poland criminalizing speech that “claims, publicly and contrary to the facts, that the Polish Nation or the Republic of Poland is responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich.”
The proposal would exempt “artistic or academic activity” but would prohibit ordinary citizens and politicians from accusing Poland of complicity in the murder of three million Polish Jews. The Polish government alleges that while several of the most notorious concentration camps were in Poland, they were under Nazi German occupation at the time, and the Nazis killed several million non-Jewish poles as well.
But some governments, including both the Israeli and U.S. governments have denounced the proposal, arguing it restricts free speech and falsifies history.
Cymbrowitz and a number of Brooklyn Jews – many of whom have immediate family that survived the horrors of Concentration Camps and Nazi German – see the ad as promoting revisionist history. As such Cymbrowitz wrote a letter to Google demanding the ad be taken down.
“I was shocked, to say the least,” said Cymbrowitz, the son of two Holocaust survivors who originally came from Demblin, Poland.
Cymbrowitz wrote Google’s AdWords website prohibits ads that “promote hatred, intolerance, discrimination, or violence.”
“To suggest that Poland was nothing more than a victim in the Holocaust, or that the Polish people were uninvolved in the Nazi atrocities, is a calculated and dangerous attempt to rewrite history and sanitize Poland’s complicit role,” wrote Cymbrowitz.
As the founder/publisher/editor of KCP, as well as a veteran reporter, I contacted Google as a follow-up to Cymbrowitz’ letter.
“We don’t allow ads that promote hatred, intolerance, discrimination, or violence on our platform. If we find ads that violate those policies, we remove them. We also give publishers controls so they can block specific types of ads and advertisers,” said a Google spokesperson.
Following this response, the spokesperson politely walked me through the Google adsense steps on how I as a publisher can review and block any ads they place or try to place on KCP, and explained how viewers also have ways to block ads.
While Google appeared to put the onus on me as the web publisher and viewers to monitor their ads, the fact remains Google entered into a business agreement with a foreign country – the government of Poland – to advocate for a policy before a hyper-local political website. Perhaps, like the Russians allegedly placing ads on Facebook to influence the last presidential election, Poland is trying to influence the local Brooklyn state assembly elections.
In any event, much like it is the KCP policy to run virtually every op-ed we receive, our policy is to let Google police their own ads they target for the site. The onus should be on them and not KCP. So if you the viewer see questionable and explicit ads on KCP with the triangle on the upper right side of it, do know this stems from Google’s inability to police themselves.
And while on the subject, KCP notes that the European Union recently imposed a €2.4 billion (US$2.75 billion) fine on Google for giving favorable treatment in its search engine results to its own comparison shopping service.
KCP also notes that the European Union is heavily involved in suing both Google and Facebook concerning antitrust laws.
United States antitrust law is a collection of federal and state government laws that regulates the conduct and organization of business corporations, generally to promote fair competition for the benefit of consumers. They were utilized successfully around the turn of the 20th century to break up the near monopolies of the oil and steel industry among others.
Thus far, the U.S. Government has resisted applying these antitrust laws to the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon.
In this matter, KCP stands with the European Union. We believe and recommend the time is fast approaching for the U.S. Government to strongly consider applying antitrust laws to Google, Amazon and Facebook.
These company’s near monopoly on several business sectors is the epitome of why antitrust laws were created. They are strangling fair competition that is for the benefit of consumers.
