Google and Moral Procrastination
It’s often said in conservative circles that any organization that isn’t explicitly conservative will eventually become liberal. And internet businesses seem to follow that rule.
Young giant Google has already used its clout in advance liberalism by agreeing to censor its search engine according to the dictates of the Chinese government. Then Google subsidiary YouTube began deleting videos posted by conservative commentator Michelle Malkin.
And now Google has refused a political ad that criticizes MoveOn.org:
The banned advertisements said, “Susan Collins is MoveOn’s primary target. Learn how you can help” and “Help Susan Collins stand up to the MoveOn.org money machine.” The ads linked to Collins’ campaign Web site with a headline reading “MoveOn.org has made Susan Collins their #1 target.” The Collins Web site claims that MoveOn has contributed $250,000 to her likely Democratic opponent and has run nine ads against her costing nearly $1 million. The Web site also displays MoveOn.org’s controversial “General Betray Us” ad.
Google’s excuse for refusing the ad is feeble to the point of being pathetic: The ad contained “MoveOn.org”, which is a trademark, so Google concluded that the ad must violate its trademark policy. This will be news to the people at YouTube.
Here you can see the ads that were rejected, the page they led to, and a Kafkaesque web chat between a Google representative and Lance Dutson, the man who actually placed the ads on behalf of the Collins campaign:
Lance Dutson: So if anyone complains, you simlply pull the ad?
AnnaMarie: The term MoveOn is a trademarked term.
AnnaMarie: We proactively disapprove ads that have a trademarked term in them, unless the advertiser in question has permission to use the term.
Lance Dutson: Let me show you something:[Lance shows some URLs of Google ads that use trademarks in a critical way. AnnaMarie insists that all trademarks in Google ads are used with the owners’ permission.]
Lance Dutson: So you’re telling me Blackwater sent you permission to run negative ads against them?
I doubt that the people at Google are bad; I think they’re just unprincipled. People are prone to moral error, so they need something a little more detailed than “Don’t be evil.” From the inside, I’m sure that the people making these decisions think that they’re acting very reasonably under the circumstances. But their mistake—the mistake of all relativists—is that they try to make major moral decisions on the fly. Those decisions, and the principles on which they should be based, are very difficult to get just right even in moments of calm reflection. But if you procrastinate and wait to do your moral thinking until the moment of crisis, then you’re almost guaranteed to get it wrong.