The fairest cop on the internet hits where it hurts

One theory about why today's dominant internet giants have struggled to get a grip on unsavoury parts of their networks, such as terrorist material, fake news and explicit pictures, is that it is simply not in their interest.

For Facebook and Google, finding the right way to censor online content - the line between extremist propaganda and newsworthy images, or between deliberately fake news and a merely misleading story - is harder than just not doing much about it, especially when their massive size means they have to rely more on technology than humans to police their sites.

Overzealous algorithms that block legitimate posts and links, irritating users, represent more of a danger than over-tolerant ones that allow illegal or unpleasant content. Besides, that content is never created by Google or Facebook; they are merely conduits for it.

Above all, there have been few financial consequences - either to advertising revenues or in the form of legal penalties - for failures.

And yet, cases regularly crop up demonstrating their failures. When you ask the companies about these issues, they will insist that progress is being made. Dozens of initiatives have been launched in the last year alone to deal with abuse of their websites.

But time may be running out. While politicians have been reluctant to directly regulate Facebook and Google, pointing to legitimate freedom-of-speech concerns, their duopoly over digital advertising, a once-small but increasingly dominant part of all advertising, is attracting increased attention.

This month Facebook disclosed that fake advertisers with ties to Russia that wanted to meddle in US politics had been allowed to spend $100000 buying 3000 adverts, potentially reaching millions. The matter is now being looked at by US politicians, amid growing concern about Facebook's impact on public discourse.

Some politicians are now directly calling for online advertising networks to be controlled. A number of US senators have called for Facebook's advertising to be regulated as it is on television. Other commentators have called for the company to at least be more transparent about how its highly guarded marketing algorithms work.

If Facebook and Google have been cautious about policing the content on their websites because there is little incentive to do so, advertising is a different matter. Ads make up 90% of Google's sales and 98% of Facebook's. And previous threats to advertising revenues have appeared to elicit a quicker and more effective response than other concerns.

Earlier this year, dozens of advertisers withdrew adverts from YouTube, the Google-owned video website, after it emerged that they had appeared in front of extremist videos. Google's response was swift: it refunded advertisers, banned certain types of videos from carrying adverts and gave companies better controls over where their ads appear. Facebook, in response to concerns about Russian meddling, introduced new steps last week to verify advertisers, a move meant to deter trolls and bots.

One could argue that in both cases the response was much more effective than at other times that did not pertain to the companies' lucrative advertising networks. Call it cynical, but governments have repeatedly expressed concerns about how Facebook and Google manage themselves. They may well decide that the best incentive is to hit them where it hurts.

- The Daily Telegraph