But he declined to answer a single question in relation to this methodology or the accompanying article. When we approached Google, spokesperson Christopher Lawton confirmed that the company blocks advertisers from using some words for ad-finding in the Google Ads platform and did not take issue with our analysis or methods. 5, 2021.įurther, all social justice keywords on list we used that included the word Muslim were blocked for ad placement searches, including such innocuous phrases as “Muslim fashion” and “Muslim parenting.” Their counterparts, “Christian fashion” and “Christian parenting,” were not blocked when we checked in November-nor were the anti-Muslim hate phrases “White sharia” and “civilization jihad.” Screen recording of Google Ads portal showing that "Black lives matter" is blocked, while "all lives matter" is not. “All lives matter,” “blue lives matter,” and “White lives matter” could all be used on Google Ads to find YouTube videos and channels on which to advertise. More striking, we found this contradicted how the company treated equivalent terms used by the movement’s critics. When we checked in November, Google Ads did not allow companies to find YouTube videos or channels related to more than a dozen terms associated with these movements-including “Black Lives Matter,” “Black power,” and “I stand with Kaepernick.” Yet our investigation revealed that YouTube blocked advertisers’ ability to find social justice content, potentially restricting ad revenue for those YouTubers. “At YouTube, we believe Black lives matter,” YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki wrote in a message to the YouTube community last June. We became interested in looking at how Google’s advertising portal handled “Black Lives Matter” after noticing, as part of a previous investigation, that the phrase appeared to be blocked in another part of Google’s advertising infrastructure. (YouTube responded by adding some, but not all, of the words and phrases it missed to its blocklist.)īecause it turns out moving fast and breaking things broke some super important things.įor this investigation, we sought to learn whether advertisers could use Google Ads to find social justice videos on which to advertise. It allowed companies to find videos related to more than two-thirds of our list of hate phrases-and we got around the blocks for all but three phrases. In our first investigation in this series, we found that Google does a poor job of blocking advertisers from targeting hate YouTube videos on the Google Ads portal.
![am i gay test youtube ad am i gay test youtube ad](https://media.wired.com/photos/5e66b003fa44ac000a9a51c9/16:9/w_2400,c_limit/targeted-ads-ideas-top-art-elena-lacey.jpg)
Our investigation did not focus on demonetization but rather on apparent steps taken by Google to prevent advertisers from deliberately placing ads on YouTube videos the company finds are related to certain words and phrases. In an article about the research, Vox quoted an unnamed Google spokesperson saying that the company tests to ensure the algorithm it uses for ad blocking isn’t biased and that the company does not “have a list of LGBTQ+ related words that trigger demonetization.”
![am i gay test youtube ad am i gay test youtube ad](https://hivgov-prod-v3.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/hiv-fork.png)
For instance, a research project conducted by the people behind the YouTube channels Sealow, Nerd City, and YouTube Analyzed uploaded thousands of videos and found that the company demonetized those with the words “gay,” “lesbian,” and some other words associated with the LGBTQ community. And there has been considerable research and analysis into demonetization, which is when YouTube prohibits specific videos or channels from running ads.