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.
