Google bans ZeroHedge from its advertising platform, issues citation against The Federalist

The far-right news site ZeroHedge will no longer be able to generate revenue from any advertisements served by Google Ads and The Federalist may follow suit.

The two sites were found to be in violation of Google’s policies on content related to race when they pushed unsubstantiated claims about the Black Lives Matter protests sparked in recent weeks by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody on May 25, NBC News first reported.

“We have strict publisher policies that govern the content ads can run on and explicitly prohibit derogatory content that promotes hatred, intolerance, violence or discrimination based on race from monetizing,” a Google spokesperson told NBC. “When a page or site violates our policies, we take action. In this case, we’ve removed both sites’ ability to monetize with Google.” 

A Google spokesperson told The Hill that sites are judged holistically when being reviewed for content violations. Both ZeroHedge and The Federalist were flagged for violations related to their comment sections that they did not do enough to mitigate.

Google informed ZeroHedge about their violation several days ago and The Federalist was informed Tuesday.

ZeroHedge did not address the issues brought up by Google, which is why they were removed from the ad platform. The Federalist still has three days to address the issues. 

Since the 2016 elections, Google has doubled-down on targeting fake news sites.

ZeroHedge, which has already been banned from advertising on Twitter because of coronavirus misinformation, published an article claiming that protests were fake. The Federalist published an article claiming the media had been lying about looting and violence during the protests. 

ZeroHedge and The Federalist did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Joe Concha contributed to this report.