Show Your WorkGoogle the Giant
How We Discovered Google’s Hate Blocklist for Ad Placements on YouTube
We got under the hood of Google Ads and found poorly executed limitations meant to hide hate YouTube videos and channels from advertisers
Evelyn Larrubia
Managing Editor for Investigations
Evelyn Larrubia worked with our talented staff of journalists to find and tell stories that show how technology and the use of data affect us all. She believes independent nonpartisan journalism is central to a healthy democracy. Evelyn left The Markup in November 2022.
She has decades of experience reporting and editing accountability and investigative journalism, including 12 years as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Her most important stories have been built on data analysis that exposed wrongs, and told through a human lens.
Before joining The Markup, she was Executive Editor of public radio’s Marketplace and, before that, Managing Editor of News and Investigations for KPCC, Los Angeles’s NPR news station.
Her work has garnered more than a dozen national journalism awards, including the Livingston Award for Young Journalists and the Scripps Howard Ursula and Gilbert Farfel Prize for Investigative Reporting. She was a 2010–11 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford, and in 2017, CCNMA named her Latina Journalist of the Year.
Google the Giant
Google Has a Secret Blocklist that Hides YouTube Hate Videos from Advertisers—But It’s Full of Holes
Many well-known White supremacist and White nationalist terms and slogans were not blocked
Blacklight
The High Privacy Cost of a “Free” Website
Trackers piggybacking on website tools leave some site operators in the dark about who is watching or what marketers do with the data
Google the Giant
Google’s Top Search Result? Surprise! It’s Google
The search engine dedicated almost half of the first page of results in our test to its own products, which dominated the coveted top of the page
Banned Bounty
Amazon’s Enforcement Failures Leave Open a Back Door to Banned Goods—Some Sold and Shipped by Amazon Itself
The online giant bans products related to drugs, spying and weapons, but we found plenty for sale; one of the items bought on the site left a grim trail of overdoses
Locked Out
Access Denied: Faulty Automated Background Checks Freeze Out Renters
Computer algorithms that scan everything from terror watch lists to eviction records spit out flawed tenant screening reports. And almost nobody is watching
Google the Giant
Swinging the Vote?
Google’s black box algorithm controls which political emails land in your main inbox. For 2020 presidential candidates, the differences are stark.
Allstate’s Algorithm
Suckers List: How Allstate’s Secret Auto Insurance Algorithm Squeezes Big Spenders
Insurers are supposed to price based on risk, but Allstate’s algorithm put a thumb on the scale
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