Major advertisers in the U.S. and Europe stop running ads on Google and YouTube as they discover their content is running alongside hate-filled, extremist content. Google and its subsidiary, YouTube, now have a lot of apologizing and catching up to do in order to gain back the trust of major advertisers.
Among the major advertisers include Johnson & Johnson, AT&T and Verizon in the U.S., and L’Oreal, HSBC, RBS, the Guardian newspaper, and much more in the U.K. The ads were removed very quickly once noticed. According to Ronan Harris, Google’s Managing Director in the U.K., “a very small percentage of cases” were affected. Google and YouTube are working to incorporate changes so that ads do not appear near content “attacking or harassing people based on their race, religion, gender, or similar categories.”
