Advertisers turn their backs on YouTube to promote hate-mongering content
Major US companies including Coca-Cola and Starbucks have temporarily stopped their ads on YouTube in the past week. This is because their advertisements are shown in hate-mongering videos. Google has previously promised to address the issue.
While Google pledged on Tuesday to step up its efforts to decouple hate-mongering content from advertisers who don’t want to deal with it, according to a Wall Street Journal inventory, this isn’t a move being done very quickly. In the days following Google’s promise, the US newspaper compiled a collection of YouTube videos with hate-mongering content that still showed advertisements from well-known US brands. When the companies in question were questioned about the situation, several stated that they are temporarily suspending their advertising practices on YouTube until Google can improve the situation.
YouTube, meanwhile, is considering changing its Community Guidelines regarding what content is allowed on the platform. In addition, it uses machine learning to detect and investigate ‘questionable’ content. Most likely, though, it’s so hard for YouTube to automatically separate hate-mongering content from content that only seems hate-mongering in the eyes of an algorithm, but in reality isn’t. In 2015, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced that 400 hours of footage are uploaded to the site per minute, which also makes manual curation difficult.
The Wall Street Journal says Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Wal-Mart, Dish Network, Starbucks, General Motors and TV channel FX Networks have stopped their ads on YouTube. Also from Amazon and Microsoft, advertisements were shown with videos that could be considered hate speech. Microsoft says it is closely monitoring the situation and Amazon was not available for comment. Earlier this week, AT&T, Verizon and Johnson & Johnson also laid down their advertising practices after the Times of London also conducted an investigation into the advertising systems.
The Wall Street Journal notes that these practices have likely been going on for years, but the advertising companies are now taking action as the media spotlights the issue.
A market analyst tells the Wall Street Journal that the uproar over YouTube ads has wiped $26 billion from parent company Alphabet’s market value to date. If this trend of canceling advertisers continues, he says it could cost Alphabet a billion dollars in sales. However, he doubts this will happen, as the YouTube audience watches a billion hours of videos every day.