Sun Web Content Hypocrisy BUSTED

The lack of self-awareness exhibited by the Murdoch goons at the Super Soaraway Currant Bun has led them once more to rant about what happens out there on the Web without realising that much of what they are complaining about refers also to them. Today’s target is Google, and in particular YouTube, which hosts videos that the Sun has decided should not be shown. Except when they can make money off them as well.

IS content is right out, according to the Sun

“Web giants must take responsibility for vile content they host online and spend whatever it takes to tackle extremism … On YouTube, owned by Google, extremists make huge sums from premium British brands … HOW long can the web giants shirk full responsibility for what they host online?” shrieks the editorial, going on to demand “Why are ISIS supporters, neo-Nazis and porn producers able to upload to the site? Why is YouTube risking the reputations of Jaguar, Argos, the Marie Curie charity and many others by letting their ads be linked to this offensive material?”

So does the Sun have an answer? Yes it does: “The answer to both is that the site is too vast to be managed by humans and the software it relies on to do the job is plainly useless. Which makes Google’s claim that it has ‘zero tolerance’ for extremism utterly meaningless … Meanwhile the advertising agencies working for some prestige UK brands are apparently too clueless to know exactly where their web ads are placed”.

So is any other kind of "vile content"

And there’s more: “The content on other media platforms, newspapers included, is tightly regulated. Google or Facebook seem mainly to shrug their shoulders, as they do over the derisory tax bills they pay or - until recently - the ‘fake news’ they spread … It may be hard to manage huge websites, but so what? They created them and have made unimaginable profits … They must spend whatever it takes to sort them out”.

Well, that’s told them. Except, perhaps, it hasn’t: for starters, the Murdoch press has no room to call others out on tax grounds, the paper being ultimately responsible to a company headquartered in the same country as Google and Facebook. And when it comes to seriously dodgy content, well, there’s more than one kind of that.

And then there's hate speech. Hello Sun leader writer

What seems to have slipped the Sun leader writer’s mind is that hatred can indeed be whipped up by video content - but the same effect can be achieved with hate speech, the bullying, demonising, abuse, defamation, humiliation and general monstering of targets both in print and online. And when newspapers and their websites promote hate speech, it is inevitably accompanied by advertising, often by those same “prestige UK brands”.

Moreover, the hate speech appears in papers like … the Sun. We know this as the excellent Stop Funding Hate campaign has been targeting Sun advertisers, most recently over another slice of bigotry from washed-up has-been Rod Liddle. SFH has succeeded in getting PlusNet to remove its adverts, and is now targeting Tesco Mobile.

So now that the Sun is beginning to suffer, someone else has to. And readers need to be told to “look over there”. The reality is that the Sun’s content is just as poisonous as those it rants about. It just does hypocrisy more shamelessly. Don’t buy the Sun.