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Google Search Is Failing to Label Ads from Anti-Abortion Crisis Pregnancy Centers [1]
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Date: 2023-02
After abortion restrictions began going into effect in US states this year, Google recognized that an update to its policies was in order. For years, anti-abortion organizations had been paying to advertise alongside searches related to the procedure, confusing women in need of medical care, and drawing criticism from reproductive health advocates.
In June, Google moved to more prominently note when advertisers don’t offer medical services to terminate a pregnancy with a label, “Does not provide abortions.” Shortly thereafter, the company expanded the label for advertisers that do offer abortions to include providers that mail pills to patients.
The change was welcome news for Elisa Wells, whose group, Plan C, competes with non-medical advertisers to educate pregnant women about pill-based abortion, a procedure known as Plan C. Her optimism dimmed after she tried a few searches.
Google’s rules, it turns out, are narrowly applied. In many abortion-related searches, Google still doesn’t apply the labels to ads for crisis pregnancy centers, the non-medical organizations that aim to convince women not to get abortions. CPCs are not labeled in ads shown against Google queries for “Plan C pills” and other search terms such as “pregnancy help” and “Planned Parenthood,” a joint analysis by Bloomberg News and the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate has found.
A crisis pregnancy center in Worcester, Massachusetts near a Planned Parenthood center. Photographer: Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe/Getty Images
Google’s failure to apply such labels consistently allows the tech giant to continue to collect ad revenue from crisis pregnancy centers on abortion-related searches, without any disclosure that such places never provide abortions or refer patients to clinics that do.
Wells said Plan C repeatedly brought up the issue to the company, but the group has never gotten a response. “The idea that there is something that we can do to influence Google is, forgive me, fairly laughable,” Wells said in an interview. “The deck is stacked against us.”
A Google spokesperson said that while advertisers targeting searches related to getting an abortion must go through its certification process, ads aimed at what the company considers to be more general queries — which may include the names of abortion providers that offer other services — do not show the labels. The spokesperson added that the company regularly reviews and updates the list of queries that trigger the disclosures.
“We have clear and longstanding policies that govern abortion-related ads on our platforms, which we apply consistently to all advertisers,” Google said in a statement. “We also don’t allow advertisers to misrepresent what products or services they provide, and we remove ads that violate this policy.”
Even small policy changes by Google, which is owned by Alphabet Inc., can have serious knock-on effects as Americans work to make sense of the increasingly fractured abortion landscape that has emerged since the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to the procedure in June. In August, the company said it would clearly label facilities in the US that provide abortions in search results and in Google Maps in order to eliminate confusion between medical clinics and so-called crisis pregnancy centers. The move followed a Bloomberg News analysis that found Google Maps was steering people who searched for abortion clinics to crisis pregnancy centers roughly a quarter of the time.
The problem with abortion-related ads predates the ruling. Google introduced labels in 2019 to certify medical groups that do provide abortions, following reports that women are often intercepted by CPCs as they search for abortion providers. That can delay their care by weeks or more, advocates say — time that is precious, particularly as more US states ban the procedure after the earliest stages of pregnancy. CPCs invest heavily in digital marketing and often echo the language of abortion clinics in their promotional materials, making Google’s behind-the-scenes vetting of who does and doesn’t provide the service particularly valuable to patients searching for care.
In 250 searches in all 50 states in late August, CCDH found that for searches on terms about abortion providers like “Planned Parenthood,” “Hey Jane Pill,” “NAF hotline,” “Carafem,” and “Plan C pill,” ads for crisis pregnancy centers that were included in the results did not carry disclaimers. In total, CCDH found 132 ads for crisis pregnancy centers that weren’t labeled; 40% of its searches yielded such an ad. The ads for the centers appeared most frequently in states with abortion bans in place without exceptions for rape or incest, such as Missouri and Kentucky, and in Illinois, which is surrounded by states that have put limits on abortions. Bloomberg reporters verified and further analyzed CCDH’s findings.
On abortion-related search queries, Google in June moved to more prominently note when advertisers don’t offer medical services to terminate a pregnancy with a label, “Does not provide abortions.” The contextual labels were added to the advertisements that showed up on Google while searching for “abortion help” in Lincoln, Nebraska. Several ads were for crisis pregnancy centers — a type of non-medical organization that aims to persuade women to go through with their pregnancies. Google applied labels to these ads, noting that each of them “Does not provide abortions.” But on a Google search for “Planned Parenthood” in September, Google provided no labels on any of its ads — in spite of a top result for nebraskaparentcenter.com, which is a known crisis pregnancy center. Google also did not add these labels on other abortion-related search terms, according to an analysis by Bloomberg and the Center for Countering Digital Hate, including “pregnancy help,” “plan C pills” and “NAF hotline.”
Ads appearing in results for some queries, such as “abortion near me” and “abortion help,” did display labels. The gaps in the system leave plenty of room for people seeking information about abortion to be misled, CCDH Chief Executive Officer Imran Ahmed said.
Ahmed believes Google isn’t applying the labels more broadly because “they reject any imposition of morality on their ability to make money,” he said. “The advertiser is king on these platforms. The user is an ancillary question.”
The Google spokesperson said the company had removed ads shared by Bloomberg that violated its policies.
While Google doesn’t disclose what it considers to be “queries related to getting an abortion,” which require advertisers to be certified under its policies in the US, UK and Ireland, it appears the internet search giant is working from a list that excludes household names such as Planned Parenthood, Ahmed said.
“They’re actively selling the term ‘Planned Parenthood’ to people who seek to provide misinformation about abortions,” he said.
Even when Google does apply labels, the ads themselves can be problematic. The Tech Transparency Project, a research arm of the nonprofit Campaign for Accountability, found over a dozen ads in which crisis pregnancy centers were correctly marked with the label “does not provide abortion.” Yet the text of the ads suggested the centers can help women obtain the procedure, using language such as “free abortion pill.” The ads appear to violate Google policies that bar advertisers from misrepresenting their services and delaying users from receiving medical care, TTP said.
Screenshot of Prestonwood Pregnancy ad in Google Search results
“In some cases, the label directly contradicts the ad itself,” said Katie Paul, director of TTP. “It makes it even more confusing for consumers because they’re not sure what to trust.”
In one example, the headline of an ad for Texas-based Prestonwood Pregnancy Center reads “Free Abortion Pill.” A representative for Prestonwood and Heartbeat International, the network of CPCs with which the center is affiliated, said that the title of the advertisement was auto-filled by Google based on the search term, and was not something the organization had written. The Google spokesperson said Prestonwood appeared to be using tools in which advertisers craft their own headlines.
Read more: The Post-Roe Information Crisis →
Google finds itself at the center of a political tug of war over how to handle ads placed by CPCs, which outnumber abortion clinics by 3-to-1 in the US, according to research from the University of Georgia College of Public Health. Many Democrats have urged the company to take more steps to limit the prevalence of CPCs in ads and search results, while some Republicans argue that the groups are being unfairly discriminated against. In 2018, Google suspended all advertising related to Ireland’s abortion referendum, but the company has so far refrained from taking similar measures as abortion access changes in the United States.
Google’s ad labeling system has had little impact on CPCs affiliated with Heartbeat International, an Ohio-based nonprofit that runs one of the largest networks of such centers, said Andrea Trudden, the group’s vice president of communications and marketing. But in recent weeks, some of its centers have seen a drop in traffic amid what appear to be changes to Google’s treatment of CPCs in both ads and search results, Trudden said.
“We do know from our affiliates that they are not appearing as they used to even a month ago within search results,” Trudden said. “We would love to be able to work with (Google) in order to continue our organizations having a presence because we know that that is a place where girls are when they are looking for pregnancy help.”
Watch the video: Google Failing to Label Ads From Anti-Abortion Centers
The political pressure on the tech giant is intensifying from multiple directions. Last week, Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, sent a letter to Google alleging that the company was “deliberately limiting pregnancy resource centers’ outreach efforts,” including in online ad campaigns. And earlier this month, a coalition of more than 100 medical providers and advocacy groups led by the women’s rights group UltraViolet asked Google to stop accepting ads from centers that don’t offer abortion in order to combat efforts to “mislead, harm, and misdirect people away from reproductive health and abortion care,” according to the group’s letter.
“We need to figure out how we can get accurate information about our health and our lives to make decisions for ourselves,” said Bridget Todd, UltraViolet’s director of communications. “And I think Google’s responsibility is to its users to provide the truth like they promised they would, and to stop profiting from putting their users at risk with dangerous, misleading information about our health.”
The gaps in Google’s enforcement make it incumbent on the tech giant to share more about what it is doing to ensure advertisers follow the rules, the advocacy groups said. Google says it uses a “combination of automated and human evaluation” to enforce its ad policies but offers few other details. One former Google employee said the company’s ad business is so vast that workers conduct only limited spot checks of the automated systems.
CCDH found unlabeled ads from CPCs across the US, but most of the states with the highest frequency of such ads — Missouri, Kentucky, Georgia and Texas — have banned or restricted the procedure. Hey Jane, a startup that provides abortion pills, has decided not to advertise in states where it does not operate, viewing it as a “legal grey area,” co-founder Gaby Izarra said. That may leave an even bigger opening for CPCs.
Using Location Guard, a browser extension that allows users to mask their locations online, Bloomberg searched Google for “Hey Jane” with the location set to Montgomery, Alabama, where abortion is prohibited. The company’s site was the fifth result, preceded by four advertisements — two of which were placed by anti-abortion centers. The ads touted abortion pills, though the centers make clear on their websites that they do not provide abortion. None of the ads carried labels.
Abortion information providers say they have also struggled to use Google advertisements to share their message. Plan C said that for several weeks in September 2021, it tried to run ads in Texas as the state’s Senate Bill 8, known as “the heartbeat bill,” which bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy and allows private citizens to sue abortion providers, went into effect. Plan C said it looked like Google had blocked the ads. Google said its systems indicated the advertiser had paused the campaign themselves and that Plan C had not sought proper advertiser certification for its ads.
Plan C felt like it was in the dark about the company’s reasons for its ads not appearing on Google. “We don’t receive specific information about the reasons for a shutdown and it requires a lot of time for our small team to resolve the situation,” said Martha Dimitratou, Plan C’s social media manager.
At the end of July, Plan C received a notification that its Google ads account had been suspended for violating the company’s “unauthorized pharmacies” policy. Plan C appealed the decision; a Google spokesperson told Bloomberg the company had determined the enforcement action was appropriate.
One day this spring, Hey Jane found its Google ads had been taken down. The company had lost its certification as an advertiser that provides abortion, Izarra said, meaning its ads did not appear across key search terms. It took about 10 days for the startup’s ads to reappear, in part because Google employees were struggling to unravel an error in an automated system, she said.
“What ends up happening is that the automated system is a black box, and even the representatives don’t know a lot of the time what the problem is,” Izarra said.
A Google spokesperson said the company worked with Hey Jane and other abortion pill providers to ensure their ads appeared correctly after the US Food and Drug Administration loosened restrictions on medication abortion in December.
While Izarra had noticed advertisements from CPCs in Google search, she did not realize the extent to which queries for the term “Hey Jane” had been affected. When she typed her company’s name into the Google search bar while on the phone with a Bloomberg reporter, she found that an ad for a CPC appeared on the first page of results — with no label stating that it didn’t provide abortions.
“It’s definitely a bummer to have some of our patients being redirected to clinics that don’t offer care for the most part,” Izarra said upon viewing the CPC ad. “This is definitely hindering access to care at a critical time. And for a lot of patients, it really delays treatment.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-google-search-abortion-clinic-crisis-pregnancy-center-ads/?sref=VDXBDESF
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