On YouTube, an ad for the car company Mazda appeared before a video that repeated the racist falsehood that Haitian migrants in Ohio were “eating ducks on the side of the road.” An ad for the software giant Adobe showed up alongside another video that claimed “people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”
Even an ad for Vice President Kamala Harris was placed ahead of a video that spread the unsupported statement that migrants were “going to parks, grabbing ducks, cutting their heads off and eating them.”
Many advertisers have tried for years to avoid sharing space with content about polarizing politics, hate speech or misinformation. That ads appeared anyway on YouTube ahead of falsehoods about Haitian migrants underscores the difficulty advertisers face in maintaining brand safety.
Just this month, researchers discovered advertisements on YouTube for more than a dozen large organizations and consumer brands that monetized xenophobic (and quickly debunked) claims. Advertising dollars flowed both to YouTube and to the commentators it allowed to amplify inflammatory and racist narratives, according to a report by Eko, a group focused on corporate accountability.
The videos that were accompanied by the ads garnered nearly 1.6 million views on YouTube in a 72-hour period after former President Donald Trump promoted a falsehood about Haitian immigrants during a presidential debate, Eko found. The group estimated that the commentators likely earned a few thousand dollars collectively from the advertisements.
A spokesperson for YouTube said videos appearing on its site might be restricted from earning money if they had violated its “advertiser-friendly guidelines” or other policies. The company said it had removed one video flagged by Eko and was reviewing others.
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Adobe, the Harris campaign and Mazda did not respond to requests for comment.
Advertisements for companies that used digital advertising platforms were 10 times more likely to appear on misinformation websites than on those that did not use the technology: Nearly 80% of the most active advertisers relying on such tactics from 2019 to 2021 had ads that appeared on such sites, according to a report published in Nature in June.
Having an advertisement land next to misinformation can be financially damaging — the share of people who click on such ads is 46% lower than for ads that avoid being twinned with toxic content, according to Integral Ad Science, a company focusing on brand safety.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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