Google makes millions on paid abortion disinformation
Google’s search quality has been in steady decline for years, and Google assures us that they’re working on it, though the most visible effort is replacing links to webpages with lengthy, florid paragraphs written by a confident habitual liar chatbot:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked
The internet is increasingly full of garbage, much of it written by other confident habitual liar chatbots, which are now extruding plausible sentences at enormous scale. Future confident habitual liar chatbots will be trained on the output of these confident liar chatbots, producing Jathan Sadowski’s “Habsburg AI”:
https://twitter.com/jathansadowski/status/1625245803211272194
But the declining quality of Google Search isn’t merely a function of chatbot overload. For many years, Google’s local business listings have been terrible. Anyone who’s tried to find a handyman, a locksmith, an emergency tow, or other small businessperson has discovered that Google is worse than useless for this. Try to search for that locksmith on the corner that you pass every day? You won’t find them — but you will find a fake locksmith service that will dispatch an unqualified, fumble-fingered guy with a drill and a knockoff lock, who will drill out your lock, replace it with one made of bubblegum and spit, and charge you 400% the going rate (and then maybe come back to rob you):
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/business/fake-online-locksmiths-may-be-out-to-pick-your-pocket-too.html
Google is clearly losing the fraud/spam wars, which is pretty awful, given that they have spent billions to put every other search engine out of business. They spend $45b every year to secure exclusivity deals that prevent people from discovering or using rivals — that’s like buying a whole Twitter every year, just so they don’t have to compete:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/how-a-google-antitrust-case-could/
But there’s an even worse form of fraudulent listing on Google, one they could do something about, but choose not to: ad-fraud. For all the money and energy thrown into “dark SEO” to trick Google into putting your shitty, scammy website at the top of the listings, there’s a much simpler method. All you need to do is pay Google — buy an ad, and your obviously fraudulent site will be right there, at the top of the search results.
There are so many top searches that go to fraud or malware sites. Tech support is a favorite. It’s not uncommon to search for tech support for Google products and be served a fake tech-support website where a scammer will try to trick you into installing a remote-access trojan and then steal everything you have, and/or take blackmail photos of you with your webcam:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/google-search-ads-infiltrated-again-by-tech-support-scams/
This is true even when Google has a trivial means of reliably detecting fraud. Take the restaurant monster-in-the-middle scam: a scammer clones the menu of a restaurant, marking up their prices by 15%, and then buys the top ad slot for searches for that restaurant. Search for the restaurant, click the top link, and land on a lookalike site. The scammer collects your order, bills your card, then places the same order, in your name, with the restaurant.
The thing is, Google runs these ads even for restaurants that are verified merchants — Google mails the restaurant a postcard with a unique number on it, and the restaurant owner keys that number in to verify that they are who they say they are. It would not be hard for Google to check whether an ad for a business matches one of its verified merchants, and, if so, whether the email address is a different one from the verified one on file. If so, Google could just email the verified address with a “Please confirm that you’re trying to buy an ad for a website other than the one we have on file” message:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security
Google doesn’t do this. Instead, they accept — and make a fortune from — paid disinformation, across every category.
But not all categories of paid disinformation are equally bad: it’s one thing to pay a 15% surcharge on a takeout meal, but there’s a whole universe of paid medical disinformation that Google knows about and has an official policy of tolerating.
This paid medical disinformation comes from “crisis pregnancy centers”: these are fake abortion clinics that raise huge sums from religious fanatics to buy ads that show up for people seeking information about procuring an abortion. If they are duped by one of these ads, they are directed to a Big Con-style storefront staffed by people who pretend that they perform abortions, but who bombard their marks with falsehoods about health complications.
These con artists try to trick their marks into consenting to sexual assault — a transvaginal ultrasound. This is a prelude to another fraud, in which the “sporadic electrical impulses” generated by an early fetal structure is a “heartbeat” (early fetuses do not have hearts, so they cannot produce heartbeats):
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/heartbeat-bills-called-fetal-heartbeat-six-weeks-pregnancy-rcna24435
If the victim still insists on getting an abortion, the fraudsters will use deceptive tactics to draw out the process until they run out the clock for a legal abortion, procuring a forced birth through deceit.
It is hard to imagine a less ethical course of conduct. Google’s policy of accepting “crisis pregnancy center” ads is the moral equivalent of taking money from fake oncologists who counsel people with cancer to forego chemotherapy in favor of juice-cleanses.
There is no ambiguity here: the purpose of a “crisis prengancy center” is to deceive people seeking abortions into thinking they are dealing with an abortion clinic, and then further deceive them into foregoing the abortion, by means of lies, sexually invasive and unnecessary medical procedures, and delaying tactics.
Now, a new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate finds that Google made $10m last year on ads from “crisis pregnancy centers”:
https://www.wired.com/story/google-made-millions-from-ads-for-fake-abortion-clinics/
Many of these “crisis pregnancy centers” are also registered 501(c)3 charities, which makes them eligible for Google’s ad grants, which provide free ads to nonprofits. Marketers who cater to “crisis pregnancy center” advertise that they can help their clients qualify for these grants. In 2019, Google was caught giving tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of free ads to “crisis pregnancy centers”:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/12/google-advertising-abortion-obria
The keywords that “crisis pregnancy centers” bid up include “Planned Parenthood” — meaning that if actual Planned Parenthood clinics want to appear at the top of the search for “planned parenthood,” they have to outbid the fraudsters seeking to deceive Planned Parenthood patients.
Google has an official policy of requiring customers that pay for ads matching abortion-related search terms to label their ads to state whether or not they provide abortions, but the report documents failures to enforce this policy. The labels themselves are confusing: for example, abortion travel funds have to be labeled as “not providing abortions.”
Google isn’t afraid to ban whole categories of advertising: for example, Google has banned Plan C, a nonprofit that provides information about medication abortions. The company erroneously classes Plan C as an “unauthorized pharmacy.” But Google continues to offer paid disinformation on behalf of forced birth groups that claim there is such a thing as “abortion reversal” (there isn’t — but the “abortion reversal” drug cocktail is potentially lethal).
This is inexcusable, but it’s not unique — and it’s not even that profitable. $10m is a drop in the bucket for a company like Google. When you’re lighting $45b/year on fire just to prevent competition, $10m is chump change. A better way to understand Google’s relationship to paid disinformation can be found by studying Facebook’s own paid disinformation problem.
Facebook has a well-documented problem with paid political disinformation — unambiguous, illegal materials, like paid notices advising people to remember to vote on November 6th (when election day falls on November 5th). The company eventually promised to put political ads in a repository where they could be inspected by all parties to track its progress in blocking paid disinformation.
Facebook did a terrible job at this, with huge slices of its political ads never landing in its transparency portal. We know this because independent researchers at NYU’s engineering school built an independent, crowdsourced tracker called Ad Observer, which scraped all the ads volunteers saw and uploaded them to a portal called Ad Observatory.
Facebook viciously attacked the NYU project, falsely smearing it as a privacy risk (the plugin was open source and was independently audited by Mozilla researchers, who confirmed that it didn’t collect any personal information). When that didn’t work, they sent a stream of legal threats, claiming that NYU was trafficking in a “circumvention device” as defined by Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a felony carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine — for a first offense.
Eventually, NYU folded the project. Facebook, meanwhile, has fired or reassigned most of the staff who work on political ad transparency:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/06/get-you-coming-and-going/#potemkin-research-program
What are we to make of this? Facebook claims that it doesn’t need or want political ad revenue, which are a drop in the bucket and cause all kinds of headaches. That’s likely true — but Facebook’s aversion to blocking political ads doesn’t extend to spending a lot of money to keep paid political disinfo off the platform.
The company could turn up the sensitivity on its blocking algorithm, which would generate more false positives, in which nonpolitical ads are misidentified and have to be reviewed by humans. This is expensive, and it’s an expense Facebook can avoid if it can suppress information about its failures to block paid political disinformation. It’s cheaper to silence critics than it is to address their criticism.
I don’t think Google gives a shit about the $10m it gets from predatory fake abortion clinics. But I think the company believes that the PR trouble it would get into for blocking them — and the expense it would incur in trying to catch and block fake abortion clinic ads — are real liabilities. In other words, it’s not about the $10m it would lose by blocking the ads — Google wants to avoid the political heat it would take from forced birth fanatics and cost of the human reviewers who would have to double-check rejected ads.
In other words, Google doesn’t abet fraudulent abortion clinics because they share the depraved sadism of the people who run these clinics. Rather, Google teams up with these sadists out of cowardice and greed.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/15/paid-medical-disinformation/#crisis-pregnancy-centers
[Image ID: A ruined streetscene. Atop a pile of rubble sits a dilapidated shack. In front of the shack is a letterboard with the word ABORTIONS set off-center and crooked. In the foreground is a carny barker at a podium, gesturing at the sign and the shack. The barker's head and face have been replaced with the Google logo. Within the barker's podium is a heap of US$100 bills.]
Image:
Flying Logos (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png
CC BY-SA 4.0
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Florida health authorities officially revoked the license of a Pensacola abortion facility Tuesday after state health authorities said three women nearly died from botched abortions.
The American Family Planning has been closed since May when the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration suspended its license for “endangering the health, safety and welfare” of its patients. State health officials said the abortion facility had hundreds of safety violations, the worst involving nearly killing three women in botched abortions within a span of nine months.
The new order from the Division of Administrative Hearings permanently revokes its license and stops anyone with direct or indirect ownership of the abortion facility from ever applying for another abortion license in Florida.
Additionally, health officials fined the abortion facility $343,200, according to the Tampa Free Press.
Initially, the abortion facility appealed its license suspension; however, the two parties reached an agreement and a judge dismissed the case Jan. 6, according to the News Journal.
The abortion facility is connected to notorious abortionist Steven Chase Brigham, who has lost his license to practice medicine in several states. Operation Rescue reported seeing Brigham at the facility as recently as May 2020. It is not clear if Brigham was the one who performed the three recent botched abortions.
Within a nine-month period, state health officials said three women nearly died from abortion complications at the facility: one required resuscitation, another had parts of her colon removed and a third needed an emergency hysterectomy, the News Journal reported last year.
The three women’s cases are disturbing. State health officials said one woman had to be hospitalized in August 2021 and had parts of her colon removed after her uterus was perforated in a botched abortion. Another woman was found with “pools of blood on the floor” around her, according to their investigation.
In the case of the third woman, the abortion facility failed to monitor her vital signs when it gave her drugs and told her to wait in her car until the abortion procedure, according to the state health officials. Mid-abortion, the abortionist lacerated her cervix and possibly ruptured her uterus and had to stop the procedure, the report continues.
Rather than take her to the local hospital in Pensacola, the abortion staff told the woman’s husband to drive to a hospital in Mobile, Alabama, the health officials found. At the Mobile hospital, the woman had to be resuscitated after emergency room doctors found that she did not have a pulse, the state report continues. She also received a blood transfusion to “replace egregious blood loss,” according to the state health officials.
The Florida health agency also reported hundreds of other violations, including failing to document patients’ consent or follow the 24-hour waiting period.
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