A comedy group called Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie had a skit about why you should keep your parents off the Internet. “I want to find out if latex paint bonds to stucco. I guess I’ll search for ‘Latex Bondage.'”
“Uh, you don’t want to do that!”
I just had one of those moments.
The quote I was looking for was “My own grandmother fought the Indians for sixty years… then choked to death on lemon pie” from the original 3:10 to Yuma. I remembered the general shape of the quote, and that it was from a western, but not the exact quote, and not the type of pie.
So I went to Google. Here’s the search string I entered, in all it’s typoed glory: “fought the Indians for 20 years and choked to deth on cream pie.”
This is the first result that came up:
Why is Google selling adword placement for snuff films? Remember all the way back when their logo was “don’t be evil?”
Seems like they’re fine being plenty evil.
That’s not the only shocking thing in those results. Here are some more:
Clearly something has gone deeply wrong at Google.
After I post this, I’m going to write Ken Paxton and Ted Cruz for their respective inquiries into Google. I think they might be interested…
Tags: Crime, Google, Media Watch, technology
LOL… You believed that crap?
Look, here’s a “tell” for you that you can rely on: Someone makes a point of telling you something, up front? Like “I’m an honest man…”? That’s a tell that they’re emphatically not an honest man. If you fall for that, then they know you’re a credulous mark, one that they can take for anything and everything.
There’s a line in the Bible, to the effect of “The guilty flee where no man pursues…” You can take that to the bank; the minute someone starts telling you what a good Christian they are, and you note the little fishy symbol on their business cards? Get the F*CK out of that business, and don’t go back. They’re thieves and crooks, every damn time. Why? Because they’re adopting the guise of the “Good Christian” to rob your ass blind. Every time I’ve dealt with anyone that makes a point of telling me this sort of thing, it’s turned out to be a lie of epic proportions…
Remember dating a girl who told me, unprompted, on a first date, how much she loathed “players” and “cheaters”. That was my last date with the girl, although she hung around my friend group enough that I got to know her by her actions: She dated another guy in our group, they “got serious” enough that he was about to propose to her, and then found out she went out partying while we were deployed and she initiated having a train run on her in one of the bedrooms… Way he found out was epic, because the couple hosting the party sent him the bill for the dry-cleaning of the bedding. Along with a stack of Polaroids from the clean-up.
Someone makes a point of telling you something, up front? Makes a motto out of it? That’s a tell; that’s exactly who they are and what they intend to do, which is the exact diametric opposite of that public-facing persona. Honest men just demonstrate who they are through their actions; crooks have to lie.
Yeah, your first mistake was including the phrase “cream pie” in your search.
Unless your using the search feature inside a cooking or baking site, using that in just about any search engine is going to get you pr0n.
I was aware of that right after it happened. But I’m not even complaining about porn per se, I’m complaining about the reprehensible, illegal types of porn Google is selling ads for.
“I’m going to write Ken Paxton and Ted Cruz for their respective inquiries into Google.”
I love the smell of napalm in the morning.
[…] DON’T BE EVIL: Why Is Google Selling Adwords For Snuff Films? […]
try that same search on DuckDuckGo…
I get the complaint but if you take the naughty factor of pr0n out of the equation your complaint comes down to marketing. You were looking for a movie with simulated murder in it and got pr0n with simulated murder in it.
If there’s a reason to believe those snuff films are real, and historically there isn’t, then that’s a case for law enforcement but otherwise it’s simply a matter of “eww that’s naughty, I like my murders to be produced by Warner Bros & the sexual violence to remain on the casting couch”.
Great Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie pull though.
Maybe you didn’t get the full quote: “Don’t be evil; that’s *our* job.”
I reported myself to the IT department when I was looking for pictures to show the distinction between “portly” and “burly” to an ESL colleague.
Aside from the (obvious in retrospect) NSFW results, apparently people are a bit lackadaisical with keywords and based on that search there is no difference.
I tend to agree with “marketing”: “Low-budget, naked fake deaths are bad, but high-budget, clothed fake deaths are OK” doesn’t make much sense as a moral principle.
@Kirk
Reminds me of this quote:
“The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
I’m going to go the other direction than previous commenters. Yes, snuff is worse than the usual Hollywood movie. Context matters.
With the former, the entire purpose of the quick video is the apparently-real murder of someone in a grotesque way … worse, with some sexual context either in the video or the mind of the viewer. As I understand it, that’s what snuff is (and my understanding comes basically from that Nic Cage movie). If someone else is more knowledgeable, well … I won’t argue.
With the latter, it’s telling a story in which a death is one part. Are some Hollywood movies needlessly violent with senseless carnage? Sure. That’s definitely a conversation we can have. I’ve no interest in seeing Django Unchained for that reason. It’s still a whole other planet from snuff.
“All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is no true-story teller who would keep that from you.” ― Ernest Hemingway
I was going to include Emerson’s quote, but I figured that would be over-egging the pudding…
The root thing to note is that every good con man starts out his patter by telling you what he wants you to believe and act on. That’s a truism you can rely on; only the truly great con men manage to avoid that pitfall by somehow managing to do what men of integrity and honor do, which is convince you of their intent by way of their actions. I’ve only ever run into a single example of that personally. It is a fortunate thing that they’re so rare.
Frankly, the one thing I’ve learned in life about inter-personal relations? Watch their hands; don’t pay attention to what they say, what they tell you in all the various ways: Watch what they do.
Nothing else serves. Observe them, carefully: If they act and conduct themselves as decent, upright men? You can likely trust them. No? Don’t give them the time of day, and drive them from your door.
To address your other point about snuff films… I think the critical difference is the depravity. If you’re exhibiting a film showing a real death, it is one thing if you’ve managed to happen on an accidental recording of someone dying, and entirely another if you set out to kill someone deliberately, with malice aforethought, in order to record their last moments for the gratuitous pleasure of others. There’s also an element of cruelty to the supposed genre of “snuff film”; many of them show innocents being violated and slaughtered, supposedly. Those are things on the far side of the line from merely recording someone’s final moments…
The difference can be observed in films from the early days of the so-called “War on Terror”: There were multiple video clips of various “Good Muslims” beheading infidels, two of which stood out in my memory. One of them was a Soviet soldier being beheaded by a young boy, encouraged by a group of other Jihadi scumbags. There was another one where they were doing the same thing to a Westerner, and we used those clips in training in order to shock the usual dumbass in the lower ranks into a semblance of realistic expectations about the enemy. Those were clearly “snuff films”, meant to encourage the Jihadi-prone, and demoralize everyone else. Not sure they worked; I mostly just reacted by determining that I’d never willingly put myself in their hands, and that I’d happily kill any of them that came into mine as a matter of preventative caution.
The other sort of “death film” was the sort of thing typified by the thermal cameras showing the fate of Master Sergeant (posthumous promotion from TSgt) John A. Chapman. I’m not sure you can put the two types into the same category, but they’re both showing the same thing: The end of someone’s life.
I’m not sure how I feel about something like MSgt Chapman’s final moments being made public; there’s something obscene about that sort of thing, watching someone’s life end. There’s an intimacy there, and violating it is the worst sort of pornography when it’s done for gratuitous reasons.
I didn’t have a problem using those Jihadi videos in training; I felt like they were necessary in order to show the nature of what we were dealing with. On the other hand, simply passing them around as “Whoa… This is so kewl…” is just sick. Similarly with the various gun camera videos showing Apache helicopters killing terrorists; if you’re doing it to show that the killings were justified and so forth, that’s one thing; if you’re some idiot named Manning and you’re sharing the videos to show off your access to classified information? Shoot the sumbitch, I say. You’re watching people die; that’s not something to take casually.