In October, Selena Gomez wrote an open letter to Google and its CEO, Sundar Pichai, asking the company to remove ads that spread disinformation about the U.S. presidential election and U.S. voting. She said the following:
Hi Sundar,
Although we have never met, I just learned that Google is making millions of dollars putting ads on websites that spread disinformation about our election.
I’m hoping you are also just finding this out too.
Please shut this down immediately. The fate of our country depends on it.
Thanks,
Selena
Following Joe Biden’s win and disinformation going viral across the internet about the legitimacy of his victory, Gomez has doubled down on her efforts to call out the tech giant. After Unicef announced that it was removing its ads from websites promoting election disinformation, Gomez congratulated the company for their decision.
Thank you, @Unicefusa, for doing this!,” she wrote on Friday. “We need more organizations to do this too. @googleads needs to stop the spread of hate and misinformation.”
And she got a response: “Thank you for reaching out about this, Selena,” the company replied. “We agree that there is no place for hate or election misinfo when our platforms are used to run ads and we appreciate anytime potential violations are flagged to us. We have long standing policies to remove ads from articles inciting hate or violence or those that promote demonstrably false claims that could significantly undermine participation or trust in elections. When content violates our policies, we take action, including removing ads from the violating pages and in pervasive situations the sites. When advertisers want to go beyond our policies, we give them tools, like the ones UNICEF used, to ensure that they are in control over their ads running against content that is not suitable for their brand. We allow them to exclude specific websites (http://goo.gle/3pqPC5o) as well as entire topics (http://goo.gle/2Uwiz1j). And we aim to make this process as seamless as possible. See more here → http://goo.gle/2IzxdCL.”
Bless our queen Selena for doing what we all should do as we fight the big bad internet.
