Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) on Friday launched a probe into the practices of four adtech leaders and two industry accreditation bodies, in response to a new report from research firm Adalytics indicating that global brands may be inadvertently funding child sexual abuse material (CSAM) online.
The probe was launched with the support of adtech watchdog Check My Ads.
Blackburn and Blumenthal on Friday published letters addressed to six major players in the ad ecosystem, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Letters were also sent to the CEOs of top brand safety firms Integral Ad Science (IAS) and DoubleVerify as well as the leaders of certification bodies, Media Rating Council and Trustworthy Accountability Group.
“We write to express our grave concern that Google’s advertising technology has supported the
monetization of websites that have been known to host child sexual abuse material (CSAM),” the senators wrote in the letter addressed to Pichai.
The letter continued: “Where digital advertiser networks like Google place advertisements on websites that are known to host such activity, they have in effect created a funding stream that perpetuates criminal operations and irreparable harm to our children.”
The letters follow peer-reviewed research from Adalytics, which finds that since 2017, hundreds of ads for major brands—including Unilever, Sony, PepsiCo, and others—as well as governmental organizations including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, were placed on image-hosting site ibb.co and its affiliate imgbb.com. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) had flagged this site for hosting CSAM in 2021, 2022, and 2023.
ADWEEK reviewed nine live URLs with an ibb.co domain in which ads appeared alongside explicit sexual content. Brands included Adobe, Amazon, and Arizona State University.
In one case, 197 video ads co-branded by the NFL and FanDuel were served on a page promoting an “online multiplayer sex game.”
According to four buy-side sources ADWEEK spoke to who were found transacting on the sites, the brand safety checks they had paid for failed.