Big advertisers — like Budweiser, Aveeno, Proctor & Gamble, and Swiffer — have been shocked to find that their ads are being paired with propaganda videos for Islamist militants currently overrunning vast swathes of the Middle East and beheading innocent prisoners on camera.
"From a contract perspective, these corporations that are paying lots of money to get YouTube clicks may not be that pleased when they find out that their video is placed right before an ISIS recruitment video," legal analyst Danny Cevallos told CNN.
In YouTube's defense, pre-roll ads are automatically inserted in front of videos and the site does have guidelines about what content is appropriate for advertising and for appearing on the site at all.
However, with 300 hours of video uploaded to the site every minute, monitoring that content is a daunting task, and YouTube certainly relies on its users to flag and report content that may violate the site's guidelines. Obviously, not every unfortunate ad-video combo is being caught. And it doesn't help that the social media profligacy of the Islamic State presents these platforms with a new challenge.
No surprise --> Islamic State has 46,000+ twitter accounts and videos with "the production quality of MTV.” http://t.co/lhaCnADoRv #ISIS
— Nervana Mahmoud (@Nervana_1) March 5, 2015
“We were unaware that one of our ads ran in conjunction with this video," Anheuser-Busch said in a statement after they realized their beer commercials had run before the terrorist group’s propaganda. "We have strict guidelines with our media partners that govern when and how our ads appear. We are working with YouTube and our media buying agency, Mediacom, to understand and rectify the matter.”
In its community guidelines, YouTube is pretty clear about the types of content that it considers inappropriate for the site, including violent content "primarily intended to be shocking, sensational, or disrespectful," hateful content, or dangerous content portraying "harmful or dangerous acts," all of which could potentially apply to some Islamic State videos.
“We also have stringent advertising guidelines," a Youtube Spokesperson told CNN. "[And we] work to prevent ads appearing against any video, channel or page once we determine that the content is not appropriate for our advertising partners.”
Though advertisers don't select exactly which videos their ads appear in, Youtube says they provide tools "including targeting and/or excluding by audience demographics, topics and category, and content appropriateness." "If we receive a complaint from an advertiser whose ad served against your video, we reserve the right to disable monetization on your video if we determine that it did not meet our policy guidelines."
It does appear that YouTube has removed advertising content from flagged videos and in some cases the videos themselves. Someone familiar with YouTube's advertising model told Fox News 8 that those particular videos had not generated money and in the case that revenue had been generated it could have been returned to the advertisers.
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