Aardvark Daily

Please visit the sponsor!

The enshitification continues

This morning I was watching a video on YouTube and I was presented with a mid-roll ad that was clearly a blatant scam.

I ran the ad by Google's Gemini AI and it immediately flagged the ad as being deceptive and offering impossible things.

Now I find this interesting because it kind of proves that YouTube/Google simply doesn't vet video ads using its own AI before allowing them to be shown to a vulnerable audience.

If Google's AI could immediately spot a scam when I ran the video past it, clearly no attempt is being made to perform similar checks before unleashing those ads on YouTube users.

Why do you think that is?

My best bet is "plausible deniability".

Alphabet/Google/YouTube wants nothing to stand in the way of its revenues and profits, especially now that it has entered a period of negative cashflow for the first time since it became a publicly listed company. If it was to actually check the ads it runs for scams before they ran it may have to turn away some valuable advertiser dollars -- so why take the risk?

Instead, the company seems to operate on the basis that they'll wait for someone to complain before they act. Even then, "act" is a bit of an overstatement. In my experience they say confidence-inspiring things such as "this advertisement has been referred to our investigation team for review" -- whereupon nothing actually happens in any sensible timeframe.

It seems awfully coincidental that the review seems to take just about exactly the length required to ensure that the advertiser's budget is fully spent before such ads are actually banned.

This effectively allows the formerly "don't be evil" company to claim to be dealing with scams whilst effectively ignoring them for as long as possible so as to maximize revenues. After all, a scammer's money is as good as anyone's, right?

So what was the ad I was shown today that raised my hackles?

What a lot of people don't realize is that video ads that run on YouTube are actually videos uploaded to the platform. These videos are usually "unlisted" so you won't be able to find them if you go searching but there are tricks that make it easy to hunt them down. Here's the video ad I watched this morning:

Now to demonstrate just how bad the enshitification of YouTube has gotten, chances are you'll have to watch a pre-roll ad or two before you get to the actual ad.

Sigh!

As you'll see from the ad itself, this is a fuel-saver scam that has been crafted with AI video that is utterly laughable.

At about 10 seconds into the ad you see a woman driving a car. This is clearly a left-hand drive car. Next we're told that the woman is a school teacher in Austin Texas -- hence the left-hand drive car, right?

But hang on... at 1:07 her car has suddenly changed to a right-hand drive vehicle. WTF?

At 1:17 it's still right hand drive but, at 1:28, it's back to left hand drive.

Get to around 1:40 and we start getting the real BS. Turns out (who would have known?) that since 2001, every car manufacturer has been sabotaging your fuel economy by fitting "hidden magnetic disruptors in the fuel delivery system". OMG!!!

The bastards!

Those things "scramble the fuel molecules before they reach the engine" and that's why so much of your fuel is simply ejected out of the tailpipe of the vehicle.

Apparently auto-makers must be in league with the oil companies because it's by keeping you constantly having to refuel that they make money. Who knew?

Okay, by now you get the picture. This is just another fuel-saver device scam preying on those who slept through their highschool science lessons and are willing to throw money away in the hope that the claims are real and they'll save money at the pump.

When this video runs as an ad it offers a link to the website where you can buy one of these fancy devices to mitigate the molecular disruptors that are killing your fuel-economy.

It's a fact of life that scammers will be scammers and a fool and his/her money are soon parted but what ought not be a fact of life is that companies such as Alphabet/Google/YouTube can get away with not performing checks that would help protect those fools from their own ignorance. Gemini spotted this scam in under a second so why was the ad allowed to run.

That video has had over 10 million views since it was uploaded and began running as an ad and I would imagine that it has been reported as a scam thousands of times already -- but it still runs so even "plausible deniability" should no longer be a defense.

When you accept a scammer's money to help them scam then surely you must accept responsibility (morally and legally) for the crimes committed?

But apparently not.

BTW, if the video isn't visible above (this story may see them block embedding) or access via direct linking, that doesn't mean the ad isn't still running.

Shame on you YouTube. You demonetize videos and entire channels when your rogue AI moderation system falsely flags "scams and deceptive practices" but you do far worse yourselves. What's more, even when videos/channels are demonetized for such things, you continue to run ads on those videos but you pocket *all* the ad revenue. It seems that "not suitable for monetization" is something that only applies when the ad revenue is to be shared with creators.

Carpe Diem folks!

Please visit the sponsor!

Here is a PERMANENT link to this column

Rank This Aardvark Page

Change Font