“The atmosphere towards immigrants is the worst it’s ever been, and people are saying they don’t know why. But we know why.”
Michael is a senior executive in the global ad industry. He has built a highly successful international career, forged relationships with glitzy clients with million-dollar advertising budgets, and managed partnerships that have made the big tech players a serious amount of money.
At the same time, he has watched with dismay as loved ones in the US have been increasingly subjected to racism and hatred, partially rooted in misinformation.
Michael believes his industry is funding such hate by allowing adverts to be placed on online content pushing racist, homophobic, or misogynistic narratives. He is part of a group of advertising insiders calling on their industry to demand change from the Big Tech firms running social media sites.
“It’s the amplification of this hateful stuff online,” he told openDemocracy, speaking under a pseudonym to protect his career. “I think as an industry, we haven't done enough to actually hold our hands up and go: ‘Hey, we’re partially responsible here, because the fact of the matter is that if this content wasn't making money, it would be off most of the platforms.’”
Michael and his fellow advertising whistleblowers were convened by Inside Track, a British non-profit that builds confidential peer groups of senior professionals in powerful industries to spotlight and shift harmful cultures, norms, and incentives.
“For years the advertising industry has told government and clients that funding hate is either unavoidable, under control or something they have no influence upon,” said Nisreen Shahin, director of Inside Track.
Michael agrees that this is untrue, telling openDemocracy: “A lot of these [social media] platforms could solve the problem of hate speech online in a matter of days, weeks, but they don’t because it makes too much money.”
His and his peers’ calls for change come as new research from the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a non-profit seeking to reduce the spread of online disinformation, reveals the huge profits to be made from videos encouraging hatred towards marginalised people.
The GDI’s researchers analysed 100 YouTube channels producing hateful and bigoted content, finding they are “on track to generate an estimated $13.3m in ad revenue in 2026”. The team also revealed YouTube is reaping large profits, retaining an estimated $6m from ads placed on hate content.
“The most lucrative videos target migrants, Muslims and Black communities, often together”, according to the research, which used large language models to conduct sentiment analysis of the videos on these channels.
YouTube operates a high bar to classify content as hate speech. “Much” of the content GDI categorised as hateful is permitted and monetisable under YoutTube’s own definition of hate speech, which focuses on the ‘promotion of violence or hatred’. This definition, explains Clare Melford, CEO of GDI, means that groups of people including Muslims or migrants can be repeatedly referred to in a denigrating way – as criminals or as a threat – but unless there is a specific incitement of violence, YouTube is unlikely to take the content down or demonetise it.
“We support YouTube in not taking down the content unless it is explicitly illegal, but monetisation is a privilege not a right,” she said, “and advertisers deserve control over whether their ads appear next to content that denigrates an entire group of people.”
The GDI identified a UK-based podcast channel that linked the LGBTQIA+ movement and the Quran to terrorism, which may breach YouTube’s own rules but remains monetised by the platform. The GDI estimates the channel earns around $23,000 a year from ad revenue, as well as generating around $19,000 for YouTube.
“YouTube has already written rules against this content, and it has the power to stop paying for it,” said Melford. “What nobody outside YouTube can see is whether those rules are applied.”
Back in 2017, YouTube’s owner, Google, faced a watershed moment when an investigation by The Times revealed that companies including Mercedes-Benz and Argos were “unintentionally funding terrorism” when their ads appeared alongside extremist YouTube videos. Major brands including Verizon and Walmart pulled their ads from the online video-sharing platform, and Google lost millions of dollars.
Google publicly apologised and promised to give brands more control over where their ads appear. It later unveiled a stricter harassment policy, which introduced specific, structured penalties targeting creators who repeatedly “brush up against” or violate rules. These changes were a step in the right direction, said Melford, but stopped short of offering full transparency for where adverts end up.
Advertisers often have limited control over where their adverts appear on social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook and X, and may be unaware they are funding content targeting marginalised groups. But as these platforms make the majority of their revenue from adverts, Michael believes the advertising industry has a responsibility to demand guarantees or withdraw their custom.
Since Donald Trump re-entered the White House last year, all of the social media platforms run by US tech companies have rolled back on their commitments to trust and safety, while many have changed their content moderation policies, often ditching commitments to fact-checking.
“I think we've just seen a reversal in the last few years,” Michael said. “In the last few years there has been no concerted effort by advertisers to go, ‘hey, we're gonna stop spending if you don’t fix this’”.
Jenny, an advertising insider in the UK who also spoke to openDemocracy under a pseudonym, believes hateful content online has exploded since companies including X and Meta (which owns Facebook) cut content moderation teams, replacing some with AI.
“They've happily washed their hands of the responsibility to control this situation, and we've just carried on spending exactly as much money with them as we ever did, if not more,” she said.
“The internet is free because of advertising; that is the single thing that is fuelling everything that we are discussing when we talk about online harms.”
Asked by openDemocracy what it would take to force big tech companies to remove all hateful content from their sites, Jenny said that “if every big player in the media industry was willing to collaborate” they could leverage their spending power.
This is not the first time the advertising industry has attempted to influence what is shared online. The World Federation of Advertisers launched the Global Alliance for Responsible Media in the wake of the 2019 mass shooting at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, which was livestreamed on Facebook.
The alliance, which established tools and frameworks to ensure “advertising dollars do not inadvertently support illegal or harmful content that damages their brands”, was shut down in 2024 after Elon Musk’s X announced it would bring a lawsuit against it and its members, who said they did not have the funds to fight the lawsuit. X accused the non-profit coalition of violating US competition law by creating an “illegal boycott” that would cost it “billions of dollars” in lost ad revenue.
In response to GDI’s research, a YouTube spokesperson told openDemocracy: “Hate speech is not allowed on YouTube and we rigorously remove content that violates our hate speech policy, regardless of channel size. We also enforce our strict advertiser-friendly guidelines that determine what content is eligible to monetise.”
