Democrats Being Blocked From Advertising On Trump's Failed COVID-19 Response Due To Content Moderation Rules

Here we go again: content moderation at scale is impossible to do well -- and, as we've discussed, things are especially tricky when it comes to content moderation and political advertising. Now, when you mix into that content moderation to try to stop disinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic and you run up against... politicians facing blocks in trying to advertise about Trump's leadership failures in response to the pandemic:

Prominent Democratic PACs in recent days have funneled millions of dollars into television ads accusing Trump of mishandling the coronavirus crisis. But staffers of several Democratic nonprofits and digital ad firms realized this week that they would not be able to use Google's dominant ad tools to spread true information about President Trump's handling of the outbreak on YouTube and other Google platforms. The company only allows PSA-style ads from government agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and trusted health bodies like the World Health Organization. Multiple Democratic and progressive strategists were rebuked when they tried to place Google ads criticizing the Trump administration's response to coronavirus, officials within the firms told Protocol.

That anti-conservative bias sure is a pain, eh?

This wasn't just a one-off. Apparently other politicians have also been told they can't use Google's ad platform for those ads either:

One Democratic strategist said his digital firm had already gone live in recent days with several ad campaigns related to coronavirus on Facebook, which allows most political ads about the disease. "As we were getting ready to start broadening [the ad campaign] into Google, we reached out to Google to clarify what their rules were going to be," said one Democratic strategist who requested anonymity in order to maintain his relationship with Google. A Google ad representative told them they would not be able to place the ads.

But, of course, since federal government agencies are allowed to advertise on the platform, and this administration appears to view the entire apparatus of the federal government as solely part and parcel of the Trump re-election campaign, that basically means that Trump gets free reign over Google ads:

The Trump campaign and Republicans across the country also are not allowed to run advertisements right now. But the democratic strategists argue that the CDC and White House's messaging, which are permitted by Google, fall under Trump's purview.

"For Google to basically say that the Trump administration is the only entity that is allowed to talk about the most important issue in politics really puts their thumb on the scale of the incumbent president and against anyone who is really looking to challenge him," said Eli Kaplan, a founding partner of Rising Tide Interactive, a digital marketing firm for Democratic political organizations and progressive nonprofits.

This isn't to criticize Google, but to again highlight the straight up impossibility of the situation. More specifically, it's not hard to follow the very logical and reasonable thought process that leads to these rules being put in place. It wanted to limit people exploiting COVID-related panic for commercial reasons, and thus chose to limit COVID-related ads to government entities only. But, the issue comes down to distinguishing political ads from commercial ads, and it's easy (if you're not having to make that distinction) to just say that you'll allow the political ads, but not "commercial" ads, but suddenly that opens up a ton of other questions that all of the platforms have been dealing with regarding moderation of political ads: what is a political ad exactly? In some cases, it's more obvious, but in many cases, it's a big gray area.

This isn't about bias and it isn't about malice. It's about the simple fact that if you do content moderation, almost every "policy" you put in place will come back to bite you when you realize that, in practice, something will happen that seems insane even when you have a perfectly logical policy in place.