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<\/p>\nOver the past few days, a flurry of high profile brands and organisations, including French advertising group Havas, M&S, the Guardian, BBC, J Sainsbury Plc, Audi, Transport for London and the UK Government, have pulled ads from Google and its video sharing site YouTube amid growing concerns that their ads were appearing alongside offensive and potentially illegal content. Most recently the boycott has spread to the US, with Verizon and AT&T also halting their Google advertising. Worries were prompted by a Times of London\u00a0investigation which revealed that ads from many large companies and the UK\u00a0government were appearing alongside content from supporters of extremist or racist groups. Consider this much-cited example by The Times below… <\/p>\n
Google\u2019s European chief, Matthew Brittin,\u00a0has since apologised and promised to review its policies and the safety controls already in place, but many within the industry are unsure whether Google is doing enough. Havas, for instance (which spends around 175 million euros annually on digital advertising clients in the UK), claims it failed to get the assurances it needed from Google that the ads of its UK clients wouldn’t appear next to offensive or hate material.<\/p>\n
As BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones rightly points out<\/a>, \u201cthere are two difficult issues for Google here – spotting videos that are illegal and should be removed from YouTube, and determining which are legal but not suitable for advertising\u201d. The latter is proving the most tricky it seems.<\/p>\n Google is currently relying on a combination of software controls and user alerts to identify content that could be harmful or illegal. Ronan Harris, Google’s UK\u00a0managing director, said in a blog post that Google removed nearly two billion offensive ads from its platforms last year, blacklisted 100,000 publishers from its AdSense program, and prevented ads from serving on over 300 million YouTube videos. Despite this, Harris wrote<\/a>, “we don’t always get it right”. He explained \u201cin a very small percentage of cases, ads appear against content that violates our monetisation policies. We promptly remove the ads in those instances, but we know we can and must do more.\u201d<\/p>\n Harris then went on to say that Google had “heard from our advertisers loud and clear that we can provide simpler, more robust ways to stop their ads from showing against controversial content”.<\/p>\n What are Google\u2019s obligations?<\/strong><\/p>\n Google has always insisted that it’s a technology platform and not a media business, with the mission \u201cto make information universally accessible and useful\u201d. It has believed \u201cstrongly in the freedom of speech and expression on the web\u2014even when that means we don\u2019t agree with the views expressed,\u201d Harris explains. Ad admirable position to hold, but arguably no longer sustainable in this day and age, and not to the detriment of brands it is profiting heavily from.<\/p>\n While Google began life as a tech company, today the majority of its revenue comes via advertising; in 2016, its ad revenue amounted to almost $79.4 billion US<\/a>. It would be fair to argue that the Google business has evolved to such an extent that it should now be facing the same tight regulation of other media companies.<\/p>\n Martin Sorrell, the founder and CEO of global advertising firm WPP, said in a statement that Google should have “the same responsibilities as any media company” and could no longer “masquerade” as a technology platform, \u201cparticularly when [it] places advertisements.\u201d<\/p>\n