U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai demanding an explanation as to why ads placed by Live Action and Choose Life Marketing have seemingly been censored.
Choose Life Marketing is a Missouri company that works with pregnancy resource centers throughout the country by developing and circulating online ads detailing women’s health services that the centers offer. Recently, while attempting to run ads for a client in the Washington, D.C. metro area, Choose Life Marketing realized that these ads were not running, even though Google designated them as eligible. Compounding the issue, pro-life advocacy group Live Action reported yesterday that its ads had similarly been disapproved by Google—suggesting a broader pattern of targeting on Google’s part.
Senator Hawley writes, “When I spoke with Mark Zuckerberg about a similar issue in September 2019, he acknowledged the danger of bias on the parts of content reviewers in this area, particularly where pro-life activist groups like Live Action are concerned. But if your company’s behavior is any indication, those concerns have gone unaddressed. Rather, your company appears to have taken a page out of the progressive left playbook and has started targeting pregnancy resource centers and pro-life activist organizations for disfavor. This would not be the first time that political considerations have influenced your company’s ad eligibility decisions.”
Among other questions, Senator Hawley requested that Mr. Pichai explain why Choose Life Marketing’s clients ads in the D.C. area are not appearing online and why Live Action’s advertising campaigns were abruptly disapproved by Google.
Read the full letter here or below.
Mr. Sundar Pichai
Chief Executive Officer
Google, LLC
1600 Amphitheater Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Dear Mr. Pichai:
Choose Life Marketing is a Missouri company that works with pregnancy resource centers throughout the country. In particular, Choose Life Marketing helps these groups develop and circulate online ads detailing the women’s health services that they offer, such as free pregnancy tests. Consistent with Google’s stated policies, however, Choose Life Marketing does not publish “ads using keywords related to getting an abortion.”
Recently, while attempting to run ads for a client in the Washington, D.C. metro area, Choose Life Marketing realized that these ads were not running, even though Google designated them as eligible to run. Worse, Choose Life Marketing was unable to obtain an explanation from your company. Notably, even a cursory investigation reveals numerous examples of Planned Parenthood advertising directly to internet users that it offers abortions, contrary to Google’s stated policies.
All of this is alarming enough on its own, and the situation has only continued to escalate. Notably, Lila Rose—president of the pro-life organization Live Action—reported on September 14 that your company had pulled the plug on Live Action’s advertising campaigns, citing “Google Ads policy.”
When I spoke with Mark Zuckerberg about a similar issue in September 2019, he acknowledged the danger of bias on the parts of content reviewers in this area, particularly where pro-life activist groups like Live Action are concerned. But if your company’s behavior is any indication, those concerns have gone unaddressed. Rather, your company appears to have taken a page out of the progressive left playbook and has started targeting pregnancy resource centers and pro-life activist organizations for disfavor.
This would not be the first time that political considerations have influenced your company’s ad eligibility decisions. In the summer of 2020, under pressure from the cryptic partisan organization “Center for Countering Digital Hate,” Google threatened the conservative website The Federalist with removal from the Google Ads platform, based on the contents of its comments section. Something similar appears to be happening here.
Accordingly, please provide my office with answers to the following questions at your earliest convenience:
- Why have Choose Life Marketing’s clients’ ads in the D.C. area not appeared online, despite being designated as eligible to run?
- Why were Live Action’s advertising campaigns abruptly disapproved by Google?
- At what rate are ads produced by crisis pregnancy centers, pro-life advocacy organizations, and firms that work with them, deemed ineligible for distribution on Google’s platform?
- What contacts have Google executives or other leaders had with abortion advocacy organizations in the last month?
- It has been widely reported that a number of aggressive internal cadres of progressive employees are active within Google, leading to harsh backlash against employees who do not share these views. What steps has Google taken to ensure that ad eligibility decisions are not affected by employee bias?
I look forward to your response.
Sincerely,
Josh Hawley
U.S. Senator