Cisco pulls ads from YouTube over concerns about running next to extremist content

Facebook, Netflix, other big brands hit pause as well

Cisco has stopped running ads on YouTube over concerns its ads are running alongside extremist content.

“We’ve temporarily paused advertising on YouTube due to instances where third-party partners did not meet our brand guidelines,” a spokeswoman said Friday.

CNN reported a few weeks ago that big brands such as Cisco, Facebook, Netflix and others had their ads run on YouTube channels promoting “white nationalists, Nazis, pedophilia, conspiracy theories and North Korean propaganda.”

San Jose-based computer networking giant Cisco first talked about pulling its ads from YouTube in a blog post Wednesday, then took down that post, rewrote it to remove mention of YouTube and posted it again Thursday, according to Business Insider. When this news organization reached a Cisco spokeswoman Friday, she included this in the company’s statement: “Google is a significant advertising partner for Cisco, and we advertise across many of their platforms.”

YouTube has not yet returned a request for comment.

Netflix said it’s talking with Google, parent company of YouTube.

“We employ numerous filters to avoid having our content appear on sites or videos that clearly don’t represent us or our values,” a spokeswoman said Friday. “While that works well most of the time, there are a small number of instances where it doesn’t and we are working closely with Google to close that gap further.”

If all this sounds familiar, it’s because YouTube last year saw an exodus of advertisers from its site over similar issues. One estimate, by the Times of London, put the value of lost advertising at hundreds of millions of dollars. In March 2017, among the brands that had pulled

advertising from YouTube included Enterprise, Volkswagen, Toyota, Heinz and Volvo.

Since then, YouTube has assigned more humans — with a goal of more than 10,000 by the end of the year — to help its artificial-intelligence systems address problematic content in videos posted on its site. The San Bruno company also recently shared how it enforces its community guidelines for the first time, and said it would release quarterly updates on the topic.