The title doesn’t generalize to “the optimal illegal ad spend at sanctioned websites and countries is non-zero”.
They’re running EU ads on household-name Russian government propaganda sites in the middle of a war. Manual curation of a block list should’ve caught that!
Is there a block list of every Russian propaganda site in existence? Who maintains such a list? Or should Google have to manually review every website every day to check if it is part of that set?
They're some of the biggest ones, and easily discernable by the most cursory glances. Are you trying to say that their efforts will catch more hidden ones but not the obvious ones? If they can't even get the easy ones, why do you think they get any of them?
