Global Alliance for Responsible Media may be violating “U.S. antitrust laws and congressional intent by coordinating GARM members’ efforts to demonetize and eliminate disfavored content online,” House Judiciary says.
Google’s artificial intelligence isn’t particularly bright when it comes to evaluating publishers’ compliance with its advertising policies, if the experience of a heterodox economics blog with outsized influence is any indication.
With a megaphone from Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi, both darlings of progressives in the “Occupy Wall Street” era, Naked Capitalism accused Google of making “flagrant errors” in its threats to demonetize the 18-year-old site for verboten content.
The Alphabet-owned company made censorship demands that were “not advertiser-driven,” listed “non-existent posts in the spreadsheet” shown Naked Capitalism, and issued “wildly inaccurate negative classifications” of its content, according to editor “Yves Smith,” the pen name of Aurora Advisors founder Susan Webber.
Big Tech, advertisers and activists also face growing scrutiny from Congress, state attorneys general and courts for allegedly squelching viewpoint diversity by seeking to starve contrarian publishers of ad revenue.
The House Judiciary Committee’s Weaponization of the Federal Government Subcommittee held a hearing on federal funding of AI censorship last month.