Thanks to Google, I help monetize Holocaust Denial and racist content.

For the past decade or so I’ve used Google’s advertising programs to help market my business online, but what I didn’t know until recently is that also means my company helps sponsor online hate speech, fake news and racist propaganda. Given our small ad budget, my company’s contribution may only amount to pennies a month, but in total, digital advertising campaigns account for tens of billions of dollars annually. Tiny percentages from small companies like mine, mean millions of advertising dollars funneled into the pockets of Holocaust deniers, Sandy Hook hoaxers, and promoters of unmoderated racist content.

The reason advertisers like me inadvertently sponsor and monetize hate speech is that ad-tech companies like Google have partnerships with publishers who allow and promote this type of content. Unless advertisers proactively identify and block objectionable sites as I now try to do, their ads will appear on these sites and provide income to the publishers (and the AdTech company that placed the Ad).

In one example among the thousands collected by myself and other online activists, we see an article asking, “Holocaust: A Jew on Jew False Flag Operation?” and an advertisement for Celebrity Cruises. Does the marketing teams at Celebrity know their money monetizing that? Doubtful. That’s the problem with the current state of online advertising; No one knows where their money is going.

Until about a decade ago advertisers had a generally good idea about the kinds of content their money was sponsoring. This mean market forces sometimes held publishers accountable when content on TV or print went beyond the advertisers’ comfort zone. But growth of online advertising has severed the advertiser-publisher relationship.

The opportunity in online ad tech is that when advertisers sign a contract with an intermediary, their ads are placed on thousands of websites. Ads are shown to site visitors who share targeted characteristics that make them likely customers. In my case, I show ads only to people who have previously visited my website.

The downside which has become obvious, is that the digital advertising companies who built relationships with millions of websites have almost no content quality standards. The Adtech companies seem more interested in total site traffic and potential ad views than whether or not the page content was hateful.

While the First Amendment is essential to our democracy, there is no Constitutional right to have hate speech funded by advertisers too busy to pay attention to their online advertising logs.

It is my disgust with this situation; my personal sense of culpability and the knowledge that most advertisers have absolutely no idea where money is being spent, that has turned me into an activist.

As part of a group called Sleeping Giants, I visit hate sites a few times a week, collect screen grabs of the sponsoring advertisers, tweet the screen shot to the company and hope somebody notices and cares enough to fix the problem.

To be clear, I don’t care if my ads are on conservative or liberal sites. I’m trying to find customers for my business not promote one party or political point of view. There are political sites on the left and right that I may agree or disagree with but I don’t mind supporting with advertising.

What I do mind is that because an anti-semitic site called “Jew World Order” has a publishing deal with Google, my ads could appear on that site and my money could compensate that publisher. [note-this site recently stopped running google ads]

Sandy Hook “truthers” disgust me, and articles like “Why Was The Obvious Sandy Hook Hoax Really Staged?” are repulsive to me. Unfortunately, Google’s publishing partnership with that site provides an income to the person who wrote that article, unless advertisers proactively block that domain as I did.

I also have no interest in sponsoring sites that allow unmoderated hate speech on their comment boards. If a site allows hundreds of examples of the ‘N’ word, threats to minorities, and holocaust denial to go unmoderated, then that site’s values and mine are not aligned, and I don’t want my ad dollars to fund them.

Fixing this is a lot less difficult than Google would lead you to believe. For years, ad-tech companies have taken steps to block ads on pornography sites. They have also in recent months announced efforts to control advertisers’ exposure to hate speech and fake news.

But for now, Google and the ad-tech industry in general have taken few visible steps to ensure racist content isn’t profitable. Until they do, I will keep taking screenshots and tweeting and hoping someone at Google wakes up to the harm the company has caused and continues to cause.

Note as of the date of this publication 9/13/17 Google is no longer placing ads on VeteransToday, and it’s Holocaust denial content, but AdTech suppler Rev Content are visible. My most recent view showed a video ad for Old Spice