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I have previously addressed IP-based advertising and how it virtually never works in a tiny country like Israel. Lately, I have been seeing a lot of Holocaust related content popping on my screen while I am on YouTube or Facebook, and it gets to be quite annoying.

You see, whenever anyone visits a website, there are certain details about them that are revealed automatically: their IP address, the browser they use, their screen resolution etc. Many websites do not bother to collect this information at all, while others use it for statistic purposes. A lot of websites, like Facebook in our case, show ads relevant to the visitor’s geographical location using an IP-to-city query.
Other website giants, like YouTube, are smart enough to suggest content relevant to the visitor’s location, based on the same mentioned query. All this is good and dandy, except lately everyone and their mother hopped on the user-generated content wagon, and the result for the average Israeli surfer is a bombardment of Holocaust related material, shoved in the face of every Tomer, Dikla or Ari.

Now, I would understand if YouTube somehow got a hold of a list of neo-Nazis, and wanted to mess with their heads so that every time they visit YouTube they would get non-stop Yad Vashem survivor testimonials at the ‘Featured Videos’ section. That would be awesome, and might even prove to be a positive educational experience for a bigot or two.
It’s just that I don’t understand why the unsuspecting Israeli should get the same treatment. As a third-generation Holocaust survivor, I prefer not to be lectured about it whenever I search for the latest skateboarding dog shenanigans, thank you very much.