US senators are asking brand-safety and ad tech companies for answers after a report from the research firm Adalytics alleged that advertisers appeared on image-sharing sites that have, according to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, been found to host child sexual abuse materials (CSAM).
In letters sent to the CEOs of Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify on Friday, Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal wrote that they have “serious concerns…[that] advertising verification and brand-safety products have led advertisers to inadvertently fund websites that are known to host child sexual abuse material,” and asked both to respond to a set of questions by next Friday.
Similar letters were also sent to the CEOs of Google, Amazon, the Media Ratings Council, and the Trustworthy Accountability Group.
The report in question, published on Friday, says that Adalytics observed ads for Mars, PepsiCo, Domino’s, Amazon, and the Department of Homeland Security, among others, next to explicit content on two image-sharing websites that host user-uploaded content. One of those websites was “notified dozens of times over the course of 2021, 2022, and 2023 that [it] was hosting child sexual abuse materials,” according to data from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children cited in the report.
“We have zero tolerance when it comes to content promoting child sexual abuse and exploitation,” Google spokesperson Michael Aciman said in a statement. “As this report indicates, we took action on these sites last year. Our teams are constantly monitoring Google’s publisher network for this type of content and we refer information to the appropriate authorities."
“We regret that this occurred and have swiftly taken action to block these websites from showing our ads,” Amazon spokesperson Patrick Graham told Marketing Brew in an emailed statement. “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. We’ve received the senators’ letter and are working on our response.”At publication time, Mars, PepsiCo, Domino’s and the Department of Homeland Security had not responded to a request for comment.
According to the report, Adalytics, which is a for-profit business that sells its own ad-tech services, came across suspected CSAM on one of the websites “unintentionally and accidentally” while researching another project and reported it to law enforcement. The Canadian Centre for Child Protection confirmed to Marketing Brew that it received several reports from an Adalytics researcher and issued takedown notices for two that it assessed as CSAM.
Some of the ads on the sites in question appeared to “include references to or source code from Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify,” according to the report. Unnamed advertisers that were informed of the ad placements told Adalytics that brand-safety companies had labeled the impressions served on those sites as either “brand safe” or “brand suitable.” With that said, the report notes that the presence of code linked to brand-safety companies does not necessarily mean the tech was being used for brand-safety purposes in these instances and may have been for ad delivery or measurement.
Get marketing news you'll actually want to read
Marketing Brew informs marketing pros of the latest on brand strategy, social media, and ad tech via our weekday newsletter, virtual events, marketing conferences, and digital guides.
In the report, Adalytics noted that “it is unclear whether IAS and DoubleVerify’s technology identified any child sexual abuse materials” on one of the image-sharing sites.
The report is the latest in a series of investigations Adalytics has published about the effectiveness of brand-safety technology that have put the industry under the microscope. Previous reports from the firm have alleged that brand-safety companies provided inaccurate metrics to publishers and neglected to block ads placed alongside sexually explicit and racist content.
In a statement posted to its website, DoubleVerify said that DV-measured ads on these sites represented 0.000047% of the company’s total, and that its technology had prevented “tens of thousands of ads from appearing on the site in the past 30 days.”
“DV has taken immediate additional measures to block this site and affiliated sites for our customers while we conduct our review,” the company wrote.
“IAS has zero tolerance for any illegal activity, and we strongly condemn any conduct related to child sexual abuse material. We are reviewing the allegations and remain focused on ensuring media safety for all of our customers,” the company said in a statement posted on its website.
Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify offer services that claim to prevent advertisers from running against objectionable content, detect fraud, and measure digital ads. In recent years, the efficacy of brand safety technology has been in the hot seat while platforms like Meta back away from content moderation, and some in the ad-tech world are focused on selling curated lists of sites instead of promising safe ad placements across the open web.
Some of the criticism of brand-safety practices comes from an apparent lack of transparency about where ads run in the first place. In the report, Adalytics quotes unnamed advertisers that say they have struggled to get detailed, URL-level information from DSPs about where their ads have run.
In letters to executives at Google and Amazon, the senators chastised the tech companies for allegedly not giving advertisers the ability to “readily access page URL-level reporting.” In all of the letters, Sens. Blackburn and Blumenthal urged the companies to “take immediate and comprehensive action to address this issue and ensure that you are not funding these heinous crimes against children.”
This isn’t the first time that Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify are facing inquiries. In October, officials from the Department of Justice and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service asked advertisers about both companies in the wake of previous reports.
Arielle Garcia, COO of Check My Ads Institute, a digital advertising watchdog that reviewed an advanced copy of the report and coordinated with lawmakers, told Marketing Brew in a statement that the report’s findings represent “a failure at every step of the ad-tech supply chain at the expense of advertisers, and in this case, of children.”
“Advertisers working with these certified vendors inadvertently funded child abuse,” Garcia said in the statement. “And without page URL-level placement detail, they were essentially powerless in their ability to identify or stop it.”