Google ads on far-right website that promotes climate denial, raise close to $1.5 million

[23/09/2024, Mountain View, California, US] – A new Global Witness investigation found Google’s billion-dollar advertising business is financing and earning money from articles published by The Epoch Times, including ones that promote climate denial.

We believe this constitutes a breach of Google’s own publisher policies which do not allow advertisements to run on websites publishing “unreliable and harmful claims” that “contradict authoritative scientific consensus on climate change.”

We estimate that over the past 12 months alone the advertisements have generated approximately $960,000 for The Epoch Times and $450,000 for Google.

Guy Porter, Senior Investigator – Climate Disinformation at Global Witness, said:

“Google’s dominance over the global AdTech business paired with localised regulatory action, means that advertisers are left with little choice but to trust in Google’s adherence to its own policies.

“Our investigation points to a desperate need for a rewiring of the global AdTech market. The apparent breaches we documented show the interconnections between climate denial and digital advertising - and how Google links the two. These practices are sowing public distrust in climate action and threatening our ability to reach a much-needed consensus on the biggest challenge facing humanity today.”

Our evidence confirms the direct commercial relationship between the two parties. This investigation documents Google-supplied advertisements on articles that promote climate denial running on The Epoch Times’ Spanish, Brazilian and global English-language websites. These articles promote claims including:

There is substantial evidence casting doubt on man-made global warming,
Human CO2 emissions only make a small contribution to climate change,
Climate science is based on faulty temperature data.

We invited Google and The Epoch Times to comment on our findings: Google declined to comment, and The Epoch Times did not respond.

Notes to editor:

Methodology - How did we track Google’s earnings from climate denial content

We used a combination of visual and technical evidence to confirm the relationship between Google and The Epoch Times. One simple indication that there is a financial relationship is to visit a website and look at the ads that appear on the page.

If it’s a Google ad, it will have a blue sideways triangle and a cross in the corner, which if clicked will lead you to a page called “Why this ad?” on a Google website. This page details why you might have been targeted by this ad and directs you to other adverts the business is running through Google.

We also checked whether the websites in our examples listed a publisher id (also known as a ‘seller ID’) in something called an ads.txt file. This is where publishers list the AdTech companies they work with, such as Google.

As Business Insider helpfully explain, “a seller ID is essentially the AdTech equivalent of a bank account number, enabling buyers to identify the businesses they are buying from, and which ultimately denotes who is getting paid.”

When you cross-reference a publisher ID with Google’s own sellers.json file where it logs all the publishers or intermediaries it works with, it confirms the publisher ID and the relationship with the website publisher.

A search of theepochtimes.com’s ad.txt file shows that Epoch Times claims a direct relationship with Google. When you cross-reference this ID with Google’s sellers.json, Google confirms the publisher ID is correct.

To estimate the potential advertising revenue generated by these websites, we used a version of the methodology previously used by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).

Our method uses SimilarWeb and Adpushup’s Google AdSense revenue calculator to calculate a final figure for estimated revenue across the three website addresses we analysed: theepochtimes.com, es.theepochtimes.com, epochtimes.com.br.

Google ads on far-right website that promotes climate denial, raise close to $1.5 million

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Notes to editor: