Censorship doesn’t always start with government bans or book burnings. Sometimes it’s quieter and harder to identify. At Americans United, we’ve seen that creeping censorship firsthand.
Last fall, while planning our marketing strategy, we felt uneasy about what the looming post-election media and political landscape would look like. We knew we wanted to continue highlighting AU’s defense of the First Amendment.
We wrote, designed and placed ads to every outlet’s standards. Website, radio, podcast and TV outlets each have different thresholds of acceptable phrasing, especially for 501(c)(3) nonprofits. To maintain our good standing, we customized each ad to ensure each was within given guidelines.
Less than 24 hours before our October 2024 ad campaign launched, our podcast ad sales rep told us that a national nightly news program had pulled our ad that was to start the next day and run for three weeks. They would not allow a rewrite; the ad was pulled because it violated their policy on political ads. I asked to see the policy and how often this occurred. The media buyer told me this is the first time and they weren’t able to obtain the policy.
A week later, many of our online ads were pulled across the internet. Previously, those same ads had never been in violation. Suddenly, they were in violation of the network’s policy, although no updates to the policy had been made.
We appealed the ban, and eventually were able to get our display network ads running again. And we learned that a certain high profile individual, known for being very litigious, had, a few weeks before our podcast ads were scheduled to run, sued the network.
Since then, our ads have been paused or removed multiple times. Often, we are informed we are in violation of constantly shifting — and unstated — new policies on “political” or “religious” content. In some cases, we manage to reinstate our ads. In other instances, we are forced to whitewash our advertising to the point that the ads hardly say anything at all aside from the organization’s name and website.
What’s happening to us is part of a bigger pattern: forced self-censorship in the face of political intimidation. Advertising platforms are “obeying in advance” — or silencing organizations — not because the rules demand it, but because they fear political backlash.
This should alarm each one of us.
Whitney Oppenhuizen is AU’s Marketing Director