Google and Twitter approved anti-vaccination ads, with widely debunked claims, submitted as part of a test; Facebook, Snap, and YouTube rejected the ads
Laura Bono, director of marketing at the anti-vaxx nonprofit Children's Health Defense https://www.thedailybeast.com/ ... Tim Fullerton / @timfullerton : Twitter got a lot of kudos for banning political ads last week. They should get even more scathing criticism for this. https://twitter.com/... Blake Montgomery / @blakersdozen : I tried to buy blatantly anti-vaccine ads from the big platforms. Google and Twitter approved them. While I was interviewing a doctor about it, Google hit him with a different anti-vaxx ad when he searched for “vaccines.” https://www.thedailybeast.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
This test lands mid-arc: nine months earlier, an investigation found YouTube surfacing anti-vaccine misinformation in its own search results and recommendations, and weeks after that Facebook moved first on the ad side, cutting anti-vaccine Pages from rankings and rejecting their ads. So when Blake Montgomery submitted the same debunked copy across five platforms, the split result — Facebook and YouTube rejecting, Google and Twitter approving — measures which companies actually operationalized those early promises.
The timing compounds it for Twitter, which had just drawn praise for banning political ads days before this approval surfaced, per Tim Fullerton's criticism. And Montgomery's reporting shows the problem isn't confined to the ad queue: while he interviewed a doctor, Google served that doctor a different anti-vaxx ad on a search for 'vaccines' itself.
First-order effects
- Twitter's new political-ad ban is exposed as a narrow gate — the same week it won credit for blocking political ads, it cashed checks for health misinformation, forcing it to either extend its ad-review criteria or own the inconsistency publicly.
- Google faces direct reputational cost on two fronts at once: its ad system approved the test buy, and its search product simultaneously delivered an unrelated anti-vaxx ad to a physician querying the topic.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's early move becomes a competitive shield — having already built rejection criteria for vaccine misinformation ads, it can position rivals' approvals as enforcement gaps, raising the bar for every platform selling health-adjacent targeting.
- Google's advertising side comes under renewed scrutiny alongside its publishing side: researchers had separately found sites monetizing health misinformation through AdSense and DoubleClick, so the approved test buy feeds a pattern argument about the ad business rather than a one-off miss.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform ad policies get set less by internal review than by journalist and researcher audits — a dynamic echoed three years later when a similar submission test found TikTok approving most blatant voting-misinformation ads while YouTube approved zero, making ad-queue integrity a recurring, externally scored metric.
- Structurally, health misinformation pushes platforms toward treating paid distribution as a liability surface distinct from organic content, with each audit widening the gap between platforms that formalize ad-review rules and those relying on human reviewers' discretion.
The trend: Platform ad-review systems are being held to content-policy standards through repeated external audit tests, with health misinformation emerging as the case where paid-distribution enforcement lags organic moderation.