Google allowed advertisers to target racist, anti-Semitic search phrases

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last updated 15 September 2017

Google allowed advertisers to target ads for people searching racist and anti-Semitic phrases like "black people ruin neighborhoods" and "Jewish control of banks," BuzzFeed News discovered, through its own experimental ad campaign.

Google would also suggest other offensive phrases based off the keywords. "Why do Jews ruin everything," for example, prompted advertisers to also run ads on "the evil Jew":

Here's a quick breakdown of how the campaign was built. Typing an exact match for "why do jews ruin everything" into Google's ad buying tool generated 77 additional keyword suggestions, from "jews ruin the world" to "jewish parasites." The keyword tool generates suggestions from the text on the destination website copy, and also pulls from search trends. Google is looking into the way the tool works, and making updates to it, the company told BuzzFeed News. [BuzzFeed News]

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.