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  • Cisco Pulls All Ads From YouTube

    Cisco Pulls All Ads From YouTube

    In a move to preserve brand integrity, Cisco has pulled all of its ads from YouTube. A now-deleted post from Cisco stated that they didn’t want their brand to appear alongside “sensitive content.” CNN recently reported that ads from major companies like Facebook, Cisco and Amazon were appearing alongside videos featuring “white nationalists, Nazis, pedophilia, conspiracy theories, and North Korean propaganda.”

    Not Unprecedented

    This move is not unprecedented, though. Last March, Verizon, AT&T and the British Government all pulled ads from the streaming site when news broke that their ads were appearing alongside videos promoting terrorism. Again, in November, a report broke that ads from Amazon, Mars, eBay and others were appearing alongside videos with pedophilic content. In both instances YouTube vowed to tighten controls over where advertisers’ spots appeared on the site.

    Cisco, a major manufacturer of networking equipment, follows in the example of those companies that do not want their ad spots confused with their monetary endorsement. YouTube’s responsibility and culpability in relation to inflammatory, hateful content hosted on their site is a topic of much debate at this point. Some argue that YouTube shouldn’t allow content containing white nationalist hate speech and borderline Nazi propaganda. Others contend that YouTube exists solely as a platform for video hosting and shouldn’t act a censor, as understanding extremist views is key to countering them.

    In either event, Cisco would sooner pull all of their ads in a show of disgust at the presence of such content than get into an argument about freedom of speech. As a business interested in making money and not stirring up political discussions, this is a reasonable move.

  • YouTube in Hot Water Following Controversy over Ads for Essay Writing Service

    YouTube in Hot Water Following Controversy over Ads for Essay Writing Service

    YouTube has taken down hundreds of videos from various content creators in response to a number of ads from “educational aid” service EduBirdie. EduBirdie offers essays on numerous topics, all unique and written with respect to various academic guidelines, such as MLA or Chicago style.

    The Ukranian company markets themselves as a scholastic aid, claiming that the essays they sell are for “research into the subject, generating initial input for further reasoning and citations…paraphrasing in accordance with major educational standards as well as tailored to your college / university guidelines for plagiarism.” While this sounds innocuous, it is clear that the essays this company sells are intended to be passed off as student work when they are, in fact, not.

    Integrity

    While EduBirdie claims that the essays they sell are simply to help students get a better grasp of the topic and have more to go on when writing their own essay, these claims do little to alter the perception of their service. Given that the essays sold are unique and not archived, it is hard to believe they are not intended for use as ghostwritten papers. If the site had archives with credited contributors and actual study aids, it might actually seem more plausible that their essays were not intended for duplication. However, no such archive exists, and even the most scrupulous students could even feel the incentive to simply try to pass the nigh-untraceable work off as their own.

    Legality

    While selling essays is not technically illegal in the US or the UK, it is still against YouTube’s guidelines for their content creators. While YouTube is generally very hands-off when it comes to ads and sponsors, they took direct action in this case and took down hundreds of videos that ran EduBirdie ads. By way of response, EduBirdie stated that they allow their endorsements to be integrated into content however the creator feels is most natural and relevant to the target audience.

    Impact

    According to the BBC report that broke this news, the videos that were removed had garnered a combined 700 million views. Students use YouTube commonly for both entertainment and research, and with the increasingly-competitive job market in the US, it can seem logical that stressed-out, overworked students would turn to these “academic aid” services in order to pass a particularly difficult class.