As you may or may not know, the leading social networking site in Brazil is Google owned Orkut. Nobody really knows why, the site was created by a Google employee in the US and I don’t know… Brazilians liked it.

As with any other Google property, ads are pushed whenever possible alongside content. And as often happens with user generated content, you cannot control it. Most of the stuff will be legal and original but some of it will be either illegal and/or crap. So what can happen sometimes is that ads will show up next to questionable (strong opinions, pornography, etc.) or sometimes illegal (paedophilic, racist, hate, etc.) user generated content.

What blows my mind is that there is someone out there that sees an Orkut profile of some girl showing naked pictures, and concludes that because there is a Nokia ad next to it then Nokia “endorses” pornography (they may sell more phones in Latin America if they did maybe, just kidding, or maybe not ). That makes as much sense as seeing a prostitute next to a poster for the next Disney movie and concluding that Disney endorses prostitution.

What blows my mind even more is that advertisers don’t realise that this could happen when they put their ads on social networking websites (or any website where there is user generated content) and when it does happen they go after the site.

Well, this is what is happening in  Brazil with Orkut. The Wall Street Journal article below explains very well what is going on, as you will see the dilemma has two parts: 1) Google’s reluctance to give away user information in order to prosecute illegal activity 2) The advertising issue described above.

There is an interesting research angle on the story, which is what a Google executive said…

Google also acknowledges the company made mistakes by not devoting enough resources to understanding a culture and country where its site had become popular. “We’d do it differently today,” says Alexandre Hohagen, the head of
Google’s Brazil office, who is facing contempt charges. “The product grew faster than the support. That is a fact.”

Sometimes local knowledge helps.

Google Under Fire Over a Controversial  Site [Wall Street Journal]