Google has prohibited ZeroHedge, a far-right website that frequently traffics in conspiracy theories, from its advertisement channel following code breaches contained in the comments thread of articles regarding the demonstrations against Black Lives Matter.
Google also sent a notice to The Federalist on Tuesday about feedback on posts linked to the latest protests.
A spokeswoman for Google confirmed Monday in an email that it demonetized the domains after finding that they breached its race-related advertising policies.
“We have strict publisher policies that govern the content ads can run on and explicitly prohibit derogatory content that promotes hatred, intolerance, violence or discrimination based on race from monetizing,” a Google spokesperson wrote. “When a page or site violates our policies, we take action. In this case, we’ve removed both sites’ ability to monetize with Google.”
Google backtracked Tuesday after this story was published, reiterating that The Federalist was already cautioned concerning rule violations but still had time to address them. It now has three days to remove the breaches before a ban takes effect.
Last week Google told ZeroHedge of compliance violations and removed the company from its ad network.
Google’s ban arrives after the Centre for Fighting Digital Hatred, a British non-profit that battles web abuse and disinformation, notifies the business of its study. They discovered that 10 U.S.-based blogs reported what they claim regarding the demonstrations was discriminatory posts, and expected millions of dollars from Google Advertising to be generated from the blogs.
Google reported that ZeroHedge had already been demonetized. The Federalist and ZeroHedge however have not responded for clarification purposes.
Imran Ahmed, CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said that it discovered advertising campaigns for several companies that had alternatively publicly disclosed comments in support of Black Lives Matter and the recent protests on the websites.
“We found that lots of those companies are inadvertently funding through their advertising content that is outright racist in defense of white supremacism and contains conspiracy theories about George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement,” Imran Ahmed said.
Google has dismissed various websites from its advertising platform in recent years, mostly targeting fake news operations.
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