Is ETSY offering my services in ads with searches like "prostitution" because I'm a woman?

[#1]

Last September 8th I saw that the ROI of my ads went from 500% to 1% without any explanation.

After verifying the search terms in which my services were offered, I was able to verify that ETSY was offering my services to searches related to pornography and prostitution.

I immediately contacted ETSY's first level support, who gave me a dumb textbook answer: check the title, description, and tags of your listing because after checking your listing, the description, tags, and title are related to those search terms.

I had to copy the title, description, and tags to tech support, so they could tell me what correlation there is between my listing and those search terms.

Obviously they found no correlation and told me they were going to escalate the case.

A few weeks later I received an email advising me to remove the tag “love” since that word could induce the AI system to believe that I was offering sexual and pornographic services. I wonder if it's that bad the ad system.

I removed the tag “love” with no result. Everything remained the same. Since day 8th September when I asked ETSY, in each of the emails and chat conversations, not to offer my services in anything related to adult, sexual, pornographic or prostitution content. I have found any solution.

Their response was that they would look into the case. I asked them what solution I had to avoid this problem. They told me to go one by one in those search terms and deactivate them manually.

My ad before September 8th had 40 search terms related to my niche market. From September 8th onwards, more than 3000 sexual search terms appeared, and I had to deactivate them one by one. Once all of them were deactivated, which took me hours and I could not focus on my business, I saw that every day more than 100 new search terms related to sex, pornography, and prostitution appeared.

Every day I had to spend more than an hour to search among the 3000 terms, new terms that were draining my budget.

Until two weeks ago, I saw that ETSY no longer allows to disable search terms when there are more than 1000 search terms for a listing.

With no browser you can do it.

The only logical explanation about this to happen is that in my listings my picture appears as a woman doing her psychic and spiritual work. And that has induced the listing system to offer me in pornographic services and prostitution. Which other explanation exists?

After more than 2 months waiting for a solution, the current situation is:

1) for two months hundreds of dollars have been misspent in clicks on my ads that have been offered to people looking for pornography and prostitution services.

2) The SEO of my listings has been affected by this.

3) Etsy not only has not offered me a solution but additionally another “bug” has appeared in the system that does not allow deactivating the search terms when they exceed 1000.

It is not only the unnecessary damage to my store and services, but the moral and psychological damage of every day to be looking for active search terms related to perversions and pornography of this type:
“spread p*ssy”
"c*mshot"
“prostitute”
"p*ssey spreader"
"bl*wjobs"
"sex with sister
"p*ssey penetrated"
and so on, I have 3000 search terms in English, Spanish, German and some other languages related to this that I had to check manually every day.

If I look at ETSY's adult content policy, it states:
"Pornography of any sort is prohibited on Etsy, whereas mature content is restricted. Although pornography can be difficult to define, an item generally qualifies as pornography when it contains printed or visual material that explicitly describes or displays sex acts, sex organs, or other erotic behavior for the purpose of sexual arousal or stimulation."

These search terms in which ETSY offers my services, are they cataloged as prohibited ?, are they pornography?, are they not related to sexual acts?, are they not related to sexual organs?

The moral damage to my family, that in my children's school they are told to my kids that their mother appears in ETSY when someone is looking for sex.

I think a simple solution to the ads on ETSY is to have a button where you can select whether you want the ads to appear in adult content searches or not.

After two months I think enough has happened for ETSY to give a definitive solution to this problem and stop making money in clicks from my services offered in pornography and prostitution searches.

This forum is for technical issues. Can you please take good care of this and provide me a solution ?

[PsychicLeticiaMedium]

I think the solution is very simple for Etsy. 

In their policies is set:

• Listings containing mature content must be tagged with "mature."

They detect in their search engine words related to pornography or "mature" content.

I think they should only promote listings for those types of searches that contain the word "mature" as required by their policies.

Another solution would be a button in the ETSY ads section so that people can select if they want to be promoted on that type of content or not.

It is a matter of will that they want to offer a solution to this problem.

What is the point of an Artificial Intelligence system that you can't parameterize or control?

[GetLuckyVintage]

@PsychicLeticiaMedium I messaged you privately with a possible explanation. 

[cindylouwho2]

Unfortunately, no one is going to be able to give you a definitive answer as to why this started happening, not even Etsy. Once their machine learning processes attach a certain class of words to your listing/s, it is hard to remove just by removing words, since you don't need to use any of the search terms to show up for them (as you have discovered). My best guess would be image recognition, but there are lots of other possibilities. 

However, it is pretty easy for them to manually remove many of these searches from the possibility of having any ads show for them. You just have to get the attention of someone high enough up to help; first-level Support rarely can do that any more. Getting broader attention, such as on social media and through bloggers, can sometimes help. 

"for two months hundreds of dollars have been misspent in clicks on my ads that have been offered to people looking for pornography and prostitution services" - you should demand every penny of that back, and more for your time, since many of these words return no search results on desktop. I have previously received a refund from Etsy Ads for this sort of reason - my SEO ebooks were showing up for terms such as "the handbook of world pottery" and "how to make a gingerbread" LOL. It does take most sellers a couple of rounds with Support to get the refund. 

Good luck!

[PillowDetails]

Excellent!  Thank you for giving the OP - and us all - some hope!

[cindylouwho2]

@PillowDetails thanks for tipping me off! 

[MouseGarden]

The AI is not being supervised much.  In a reverse image search I found my knitted garter stitch scarves on an Etsy marketpage advertising garter belts.  I had to take out those keywords, even though it is a valid knitting stitch.

What you are experiencing is awful and you should keep at Etsy until they fix this issue and compensate you for it.  

[hopeandjoystudios]

I was wondering how long it would take AI to figure out porn gets a lot of clicks and searches. Not long apparently.  The fact you were told the tag "love" = porn keyword returns is ridiculous and not acceptable. How many people use love in a tag? Ope..search return 6,495,053!  I hope at least that was a chat person as they I feel sometimes pull replies out of their hat...or wherever.

[SVGRox]

Why is this not surprising?

[DragonflyDreams1]

Reading this post earlier has haunted me most of the day. I discussed it with my husband and he mentioned that AI needs to be guided and corrected or it goes badly. He equated it to leaving a toddler alone. My comment back to him was "well, the toddler is now watching porn". 

The part that is bothering me the most is that what is on the internet is there forever. I would advise the OP to obtain an attorney. What has happened is incredibly damaging and cannot be undone. 

[OneEyeCatStudio]

"... and he mentioned that AI needs to be guided and corrected or it goes badly. He equated it to leaving a toddler alone."

IMO, it will take a major lawsuit for Etsy to start caring about how very, very, very bad at their job they have become. 

But it will be too late, then, won't it?
That major lawsuit will likely be the end of Etsy.

[thatregina · Accepted solution]

Hello Leticia,

I'm so sorry for the distress of this situation. I've referred this to the appropriate teams for review, so please look out for a direct response on this soon. I'll close this up with my best wishes to you Leticia, and my thanks to those who offered support and insights.