Google bans ZeroHedge for ‘racist’ posts, gives The Federalist warning

Tech giant Google has barred ZeroHedge from its lucrative ad platform and threatened to boot The Federalist after finding “racist” content on their pages related to the Black Lives Matter movement.

ZeroHedge, a mostly financial website that posts articles from anonymous writers, will no longer be able to rake in millions of dollars of ad revenue through the search giant’s platform after it was found to have violated Google’s policies related to race, NBC News reported.

The Federalist, known for its right-wing content, has been warned that it, too, could be booted from the ad platform because of hate speech in its comments section.

Google made the moves after NBC News’ Verification Unit flagged research conducted by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which found that the sites had “published what they say are racist articles about the protests.”

The CEO of the CCDH, Imran Ahmed, said that his organization’s research found ads from companies that have publicly supported Black Lives Matter alongside “content that is outright racist in defense of white supremacism and contains conspiracy theories about George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement.”

The organization flagged a post from ZeroHedge said that the protests were “fake,” and one from The Federalist claiming that the media had lied about looting during the George Floyd protests.

The Federalist, which was only cited for hate speech in its comments section, was not demonetized and has been given a chance to clean up its site, a Google spokesperson told Adweek. A representative for Google did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.

“We have strict publisher policies that govern the content ads can run on and explicitly prohibit derogatory content that promotes hatred, intolerance, violence or discrimination based on race from monetizing,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “When a page or site violates our policies, we take action.”

It’s not ZeroHedge’s first major run-in with big tech. The blog’s page was suspended by Twitter in February for publishing an article linking a Chinese scientist to the coronavirus outbreak.

Twitter reinstated the blog’s page last week after determining that the suspension was a mistake.

“We made an error in our enforcement action in this case. Based on additional context from the account holder in appeal, we have reinstated the account,” Twitter said in a statement. It gave no further detail and did not say what additional context it had received.

ZeroHedge, which covers mostly finance and economics-related news, posts articles using the pseudonym Tyler Durden, a fictional character played by Brad Pitt in the movie “Fight Club.”

With Post wires