YouTube hate preachers share screens with household names

Source: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/youtube-hate-preachers-share-screens-with-household-names-kdmpmkkjk

TIMES INVESTIGATION
YouTube hate preachers share screens with household names
Alexi Mostrous, Head of Investigations
March 17 2017, 12:01am,
The Times

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A BBC advert appeared on a YouTube video posted by the National Rebirth of Poland, a far-right group
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Just as Steven Anderson reached the climax of his latest hate-filled sermon, uploaded each week on to YouTube, he was replaced on computer screens by a close-up image of the actress Helen Mirren.

Dame Helen was appearing in a L’Oréal campaign for the Prince’s Trust, the charity set up to empower young people to get into jobs, education and training. The advert appeared while Anderson’s sermon was playing, its inclusive message clashing with the bearded preacher’s exhortations that homosexuals “were not born that way, but they will burn that way”.

L’Oréal was far from the only brand to advertise on YouTube videos posted on behalf of Anderson, despite the preacher being banned from Britain last year after responding to a terrorist attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando by saying: “The good news is that there’s 50 less paedophiles in the world.”

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Transport for London, the government body, also found itself promoted on his videos, as did The Guardian, Sainsbury’s, Nissan and the Diana Award, a charity set up in memory of Diana, Princess of Wales. An image of the Duke of Cambridge greeting the charity’s applicants prefaced an Anderson sermon entitled “Eunuchs and Sodomites”.

More government-funded adverts, for organisations as varied as the Royal Navy, the BBC and Visit Scotland, pop up on YouTube videos of David Duke, a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and Holocaust denier, Michael Savage, a DJ banned in the UK for “fostering hatred”, Wagdi Ghoneim, an extremist Islamic preacher who has reportedly praised Osama bin Laden, and the National Rebirth of Poland, a group of Polish nationalists based in London and Manchester.


One Royal Air Force advert appeared on an antisemitic and pro-Hitler video posted by King David the Recruiter, a Christian rap artist. King David’s music is also sold through Google’s Play store.

In most cases, the advertiser was inadvertently providing the extremists with a stream of revenue. YouTube posters are typically paid up to $7.60 (about £6.15) for every 1,000 views an advert attracts, with Google also taking a cut. Some of the most popular extremist videos on the platform have more than a million hits.

Reputable brands are promoted next to hate-filled videos thanks to complex computerised tools used by advertising agencies to buy commercial space automatically in the milliseconds it takes a page to load.

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Helen Mirren’s L’Oréal advert promoting the Prince’s Trust was on a video posted by hate preacher Steven Anderson
Known as programmatic advertising, the tools allow brands to target potential customers on whatever website they visit; meaning that if someone clicked on the L’Oréal website in February, an advert for the company might be shown to the same person looking at a hate site today.

Media agencies have already come under pressure to tell clients more about how they buy and sell adverts programmatically after evidence emerged suggesting that some were pocketing high margins without justification. But criticism is increasingly turning to Google and other big social media platforms that host and serve the adverts themselves.

These internet behemoths and publishers make vast profits from advertising, critics say, while failing to police extremist content flowing on to their systems.

“The fundamental issue is that you [Google] have to take responsibility for this as a media company,” Sir Martin Sorrell, head of WPP, the advertising and PR company, said last week. “You are not a passive digital engineer tightening the digital pipes with your digital spanner and not responsible for the flowthrough of content of those pipes, you are responsible for it.”

A few days later, Peter Barron, Google’s vice-president for communications, was put under pressure by MPs on the home affairs select committee after he told them that the company did not look for hate content on YouTube, instead relying on users to notify it. Google, Facebook and Twitter were engaged in “commercial prostitution”, David Winnick, MP, said, adding that he would be “ashamed” to work there.

Yvette Cooper, chairwoman of the committee, told the three social media companies that they made billions of pounds a year from their UK-based users. “You all have a terrible reputation among users for dealing swiftly with problems in content even against your own community standards,” she said.

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Controversial US pastor Steven Anderson’s YouTube videos carried adverts for L’Oréal
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Last night Chuka Umunna, another member of the committee, said that it was “staggering” to hear that both Google and extremists were making money out of adverts appearing alongside extreme and grotesque content.

“They say they are taking action but proper action will require far more resources and their profits will have to take a hit — that is the elephant in the room that they dare not acknowledge,” he said. “Profit comes first for these people.”

Johnny Hornby, founder of the advertising group The&Partnership, said that “far too little is being done to make a dent in the billions our clients are losing to fraudsters — let alone the reputational damage caused by the inadequate brand safety policies of platforms like Google, YouTube and Facebook.

“It should be within our gift as the clients who invest the money, and as the media agencies who recommend where to spend it, to simply agree to withdraw media spend from environments where we cannot guarantee safety for our clients’ brands.”

He said that Google and Facebook risked a boycott from the world’s big advertisers unless they “sort this out”.

Many brands had tightened their digital advertising policies after The Times revealed last month that their adverts were appearing next to extremist content posted by supporters of Islamic State and Combat 18.

However, brands including Sandals, Sainsbury’s, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz, Honda, HSBC, Disney and Lloyds were all running adverts on hate-filled YouTube videos last week, exposing the difficulty in stopping the practice. Nissan said it was urgently reviewing its YouTube ads. The Diana Award said it had “absolutely no idea that its brand was being advertised in this way” and had taken immediate action to stop the ads.

When informed of their presence on extremist sites, brands rushed to remove their adverts from YouTube. Channel 4, whose adverts were plastered across several extremist videos, said that the platform was “no longer safe”. Transport for London, one of the main government advertisers, said it was suspending its YouTube ads. The Guardian and Sainsbury’s said that Google’s actions were unacceptable. L’Oréal said it was horrified that its campaign was placed next to Anderson’s videos. It added that some YouTube content was “incorrectly categorised” and as a result the campaign was featured on the channels.

One industry insider said: “Google is very fast to act when pornographic or copyrighted material is uploaded on to YouTube. So why does removing hate speech take three or four weeks? The company needs to hire more people to deal with this.”

Mr Barron told the committee that Google received 200,000 flags a day about inappropriate content and that 98 per cent were reviewed within 24 hours.

In a separate move yesterday it announced that it had enlisted 10,000 of its contractors to flag pages as upsetting or offensive to try to stop neo-Nazi sites appearing high up in results. Mark Gardner of the Community Security Trust, a Jewish antiracist charity, said: “We hope this initiative is both serious and successful. The time is long overdue for internet and social media giants to meet their responsibility to society.”