I think there was a a line somewhere between “we will literally run ads that purport to sell products that obviously cannot exist based on any known physics” and “we audit the financials of the parent companies of anyone that advertises on our platform” that would reasonably qualify as due diligence.

The problem isn’t that sometimes Google screws up and lets a bad actor advertise on its platform, it’s that Google (and others) have made it their business model to allow bad actors to advertise on their platform. They knowingly profit from fraud.

Out of curiosity I have followed up on some of the most blatantly ridiculous ads. They typically are a first tier filter for gullibility, and never actually lead to the promised product, but rather diverting into a web of identity theft fishing, investing fraud, cryptocurrency theft, malware droppers, etc. These are funnels into real harm. And the sucker pitch is intentionally an obviously impossible product that any decent 7B LLM would tell you is probably fraudulent.

Now that I followed a few up to see where they went, that account gets shown hundreds of ads of this type from Google, and especially on YouTube. I did some AdWords research to see what those click throughs would sell for and they are very high priced exposures and clicks.

This would be trivial for Google to flag if they wanted to, but it’s a significant and growing revenue generator.