Several major U.S. companies were apparently caught unaware that ads featuring their products were playing before Islamic State-related videos recently uploaded to YouTube. Proctor & Gamble, Toyota and Anheuser-Busch were among the companies with pre-roll ads running before videos associated with the militant Islamist group, also known as ISIS or ISIL, that has taken over swathes of Iraq and Syria.
According to NBC News, Google-owned YouTube has been busy removing the ads, and in many cases the videos themselves due to policy violations. Some of the ads were playing before the videos as late as Tuesday morning before the content was taken down.
"YouTube has clear policies prohibiting content intended to incite violence, and we remove videos violating these policies when flagged by our users. We also have stringent advertising guidelines, and work to prevent ads appearing against any video once we determine that the content is not appropriate for our advertising partners," a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement to NBC News.
YouTube videos are frequently preceded by ads that are picked at random by an algorithm. That means often neither YouTube nor the advertiser will know what ads are playing before which videos.
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