Last month, Google removed ads by an animal advocacy group that was raising awareness on cruel dog experiments that received funding from a Dr. Anthony Fauci-led division of the National Institute of Health (NIH). The search giant was not clear on the policies that the ads violated.
While the cruel animal experimentation story is now a national scandal, the public could have learned about it earlier if it were not for Big Tech censorship.
The White Coat Waste Project (WCW) is an animal advocacy group that raises awareness on taxpayer-funded experiments involving animals. The group investigates government-backed research and creates public awareness of these questionable research projects.
Through Freedom of Information Act requests, WCW discovered that Fauci’s division of the NIH had “spent $424,000 to commission a study in which healthy beagles are given an experimental drug and then intentionally infested with flies that carry a disease-causing parasite that affects humans.”
WCW publicized the research, which it considers cruel to dogs, by running ads on Google.
Speaking to Inquire, WCW’s VP of Advocacy and Public Policy Justin Goodman said: “To spread the word, we attempted to run Google search ads so that when people searched for NIH or Fauci or Fauci dogs, they’d see ads about the experiments that are being funded by the NIH.”
The ads were pulled down by Google the same day they began running.
“Not only did they take them down, but they suspended our account. It remains suspended now. And they’ve refused to provide any information about what was wrong with the ads and why they took them down,” Goodman said.
WCW appealed Google’s decision to remove the ads. A screenshot of an email from Google, shared to Inquire, shows that Google refused the appeal and did not specify what policies WCW’s ads violated.
As noted by Inquire, the censorship of the ads and the suspension of WCW’s accounts is “yet another in a string of opaque decisions made by Google when it comes to censorship on their platforms. Because Google controls a massive chunk of the digital advertising market, any organization that is prohibited from running ads there is being shut out of a massive portion of the global communications circuit.”
