Google advertisers capable of using racist search terms
UNITED STATES: Google allowed advertisers to buy advertisements directed to users who searched for racist terms and also automatically suggested other offensive phrases.
The internet giant’s advertising platform is meant to block offensive terms from being used in marketing campaigns but allowed a number of anti-semitic and racist phrases.
The website BuzzFeed News reported that it was able to run an advertising campaign targeting the keywords ‘‘Why do Jews ruin everything’’, with Google suggesting additional terms including ‘‘the evil Jew’’ and ‘‘Jewish control of banks’’. It was also able to run a campaign that was displayed to users who searched for ‘‘Zionists control the world’’.
Last week it emerged that Facebook was allowing advertisers to target people who expressed interest in anti-semitic themes including phrases such as ‘‘How to burn Jews’’ and ‘‘Hitler did nothing wrong’’.
Google’s advertising sales software allows users to enter search terms which they want their advert for a website to be displayed alongside.
It also automatically suggests additional keywords that are drawn from the link the advert will direct to as well as general search trends. These are generated using computer algorithms.
In response to the potential keywords ‘‘white people ruin’’, Google suggested it could also target the adverts at searches for ‘‘black people ruin neighbourhoods’’ and ‘‘black people destroy everything’’.
Google has since disabled most of the keywords after being contacted with details of the problem and said not all suggested keywords can be purchased.
Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s senior vice-president of advertising, said: ‘‘Our goal is to prevent our keyword suggestions tool from making offensive suggestions, and to stop any offensive ads appearing. In this instance, ads didn’t run against the vast majority of these keywords, but we didn’t catch all these offensive suggestions. That’s not good enough and we’re not making excuses. We’ve already turned off these suggestions, and any ads that made it through, and will work harder to stop this from happening again.’’
The revelations about Google’s advertising are the latest in a string of criticisms about the way in which technology companies sell online advertising.
Last week ProPublica, a nonprofit news organisation, revealed that Facebook also allowed adverts to be directed towards users who were self-described ‘‘Jew haters’’. Facebook said the anti-semitic advertising categories had been created by an algorithm and had now been removed.
The same news organisation has previously revealed that Facebook had been allowing users to exclude specified ethnicities from adverts, raising concerns it was breaking US discrimination laws.
The company subsequently blocked those placing adverts for housing, employment, or credit from targeting what it calls users’ ‘‘ethnic affinities’’.
Earlier this year, some of the world’s biggest brands suspended their advertising on Google and its video platform YouTube after it was revealed their adverts were appearing next to extremist content.