Thread by @doctorow

Pay Up, Or We’ll Make Google Ban Your Ads krebsonsecurity.com/2020/02/pay-up…

Extortionists know Google will kill a website's ads and claw back its money if they detect fraudulent clicks, and they know that it's impossible to get anyone at Google to answer the phone if this happens.

1/

From there, it's a pretty simply leap to start to send extortion notices to smaller sites threatening to unleash bots to click on their ads and get their Google accounts killed if they don't pay menaces money.

2/

This literally happens to every system of algorithmic banning, including Youtube's Content ID, where extortionists threaten to lodge fake copyright complaints against creators' accounts if they aren't paid.

theverge.com/2019/2/11/1822…

3/

We'll see a LOT more of this thanks to the EU's #CopyrightDirective, which requires #UploadFilters but does NOT allow platforms to ignore copyright claims from known fraudsters and extends no punishment for copyfraud.

4/

This comes up a lot in discussions about What Twitter Needs to Do About Nazis. Only a few silly people say Twitter should have humans review ALL posts, so the alternative is a report-and-ban approach.

5/

If you're a professional troll, you've got the means, motive & opportunity to become a skilled Twitter Lawyer who knows exactly how to get your victims banned, while they will struggle with increasingly baroque quasi-judicial procedures Twitter creates and amends and amends.

6/

The answer isn't to insist that things be done well at the unimaginable scale that Big Tech operates at. It's to insist that companies be cut down to size, so their judgments require less context and their bad calls are less harmful.

7/

Getting banned from Google Ads because of a fraudster wouldn't be that big a deal if there were a million other ad companies. But Goog and FB control nearly the entire online ad market, turning them to into juicy blackmail systems.

8/