The website, which garners over 40 million page views per month, according to Semrush, includes both explicit adult content as well as illegal CSAM. Researchers were unable to determine ownership of the sites.
Adtech firms respond, pointing to ‘strict policies’
A significant number of the ad placements in question were facilitated by leading adtech demand-side platforms (DSPs) including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Criteo, Quantcast, Nexxen, TripleLift, and others—despite the fact that most of these organizations, including Google and Amazon, have strict ad inventory policies that forbid transactions on pages hosting CSAM.
Although some adtech platforms, including Google, appear to have ceased transacting on these platforms as of January, others continue to serve ads, per the report.
“We have zero tolerance when it comes to contentpromoting child sexual abuse and exploitation and both of the accounts in question are terminated,” a Google spokesperson told ADWEEK in a statement, adding that the company uses both human reviewers and AI-powered enforcement systems to help enforce Google policies globally.
An Amazon spokesperson said: “We regret that this occurred and have swiftly taken action to block these websites from showing our ads. We have strict policies in place against serving ads on content of this nature, and we are taking additional steps to help ensure this does not happen in the future.”
In their letters, lawmakers not only denounced what they view as substantial and dangerous failures in the adtech ecosystem, but also called on leaders of the organizations they addressed to provide responses to a slate of questions about their policies and practices.
Executives at Google, Amazon, IAS, DoubleVerify, MRC, and TAG have been asked to respond to specific questions by Feb. 14.
Read the full text of the letters below.
Letter to Google
Dear Mr. Pichai,
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). Recent research indicates that Google, as recently as recently as March 2024, has facilitated the placement of advertising on imgbb.com, a website that has been known to host CSAM since at least 2021, according to transparency reports released by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). Just as concerning are reports that the United States government’s own advertising has appeared on this website. The dissemination of CSAM is a heinous crime that inflicts irreparable harm on its victims. 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.
Google’s actions here—or in best case, inaction—are problematic for several reasons. First, the instances of ads being served on a website known to host illegal CSAM via Google’s advertising technologies violates Google’s own policies. As you are aware, the production, distribution, sale, and possession of materials depicting CSAM is violates federal law. Google’s own publisher policies further prohibit the monetization of content that “is illegal, promotes illegal activity, or infringes on the legal rights of others” and explicitly prohibit “[c]hild sexual abuse and exploitation,” stating that it does not allow content that “[s]exually exploits or abuses children or content that promotes the sexual exploitation or abuse of children…[including] all child sexual abuse materials.” While Google’s policies state that the company will take “appropriate action, which may include reporting to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children and disabling accounts.” It remains unclear, however, whether Google has ceased its relationship with the website identified in this report, 9 and it is deeply troubling that the largest advertising technology company continued to monetize the website for at least three years since NCMEC first identified the website as a purveyor of CSAM.