A number of vulgar viral sites that make money from fake news, adult content, and hate speech are registered with the Japanese Brave News source.
These sites are not only low quality in content, but also intentionally unencrypted to allow third parties to snoop on communications, heavily use trackers and advertisements, and contain paid links, all of which are in direct conflict with Brave’s self-proclaimed policy of emphasizing privacy.
I would like to see a review of the Japanese Brave News source conducted first and foremost.
The following is a partial list of problematic sites.
A screenshot of the “(*ﾟ∀ﾟ)ゞカガクニュース隊” is attached.
When taking the screenshot, I dared to turn off the built-in ad blocker to show how many low-quality ads are displayed.
Even if the built-in ad blocker is enabled, its performance is not as good as uBlock or AdGuard, so even if you register an appropriate filter, it will not remove pay links, etc.
If you actually visit the sites, even if you can’t read Japanese, you will understand how suspicious the above sites are from the many trackers and advertisements.
(New users are only allowed to post up to four URLs, so I could not post all of them.)
Like uBO/Adguard, we have a set amount of default lists. Any language/country specific fitlers we’ll move to the appropriate list owner to sort out. I’ve implemented a basic fix for the related sites.
I would recommend if you’re needing any Japanese related filters, just enable Japanese filter in brave://adblock. We use the same regional lists in Brave, and uBO.
I’m not saying that the built-in ad-blocker doesn’t remove ads from the sites, I’m saying that the “Brave News” source, which is a feature of the Brave browser and curated by Brave Inc., contains a lot of shady sites.
Why is Brave Inc. pushing the money-making viral sites run by LINE co., which affirms Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, onto its users in the first place?
Is it correct to assume that Brave Inc. is supporting Russia?
I think you may be confusing few things as per my understanding.
1.) The Brave news/brave today news feeds via cards you see on homepage only has limited new sites added. Appromoxately 100 and majority of them are western.
2.) Are you seeing the ‘vulgar’ sites in the News section of the Brave search? If so, brave shields or adblocker has no control of it. You will need to enable strict mode on the brave search settings.
Later on, brave search will have a ‘goggles’ feature, look it up. By it, you may be able to block the ‘vulgar’ sites altogether from brave search.
4.) Brave company has nothing to do with the russia-ukraine thing going on. So, do not make false assumptions about brave linkage with the matter.
5.) Now, I do not exactly that brave news/brave today sites seen on the homepage for japenese browsers/users are different than all the other international variants of browsers.
