In a move to preserve brand integrity, Cisco has pulled all of its ads from YouTube. A now-deleted post from Cisco stated that they didn’t want their brand to appear alongside “sensitive content.” CNN recently reported that ads from major companies like Facebook, Cisco and Amazon were appearing alongside videos featuring “white nationalists, Nazis, pedophilia, conspiracy theories, and North Korean propaganda.”
Not Unprecedented
This move is not unprecedented, though. Last March, Verizon, AT&T and the British Government all pulled ads from the streaming site when news broke that their ads were appearing alongside videos promoting terrorism. Again, in November, a report broke that ads from Amazon, Mars, eBay and others were appearing alongside videos with pedophilic content. In both instances YouTube vowed to tighten controls over where advertisers’ spots appeared on the site.
Cisco, a major manufacturer of networking equipment, follows in the example of those companies that do not want their ad spots confused with their monetary endorsement. YouTube’s responsibility and culpability in relation to inflammatory, hateful content hosted on their site is a topic of much debate at this point. Some argue that YouTube shouldn’t allow content containing white nationalist hate speech and borderline Nazi propaganda. Others contend that YouTube exists solely as a platform for video hosting and shouldn’t act a censor, as understanding extremist views is key to countering them.
In either event, Cisco would sooner pull all of their ads in a show of disgust at the presence of such content than get into an argument about freedom of speech. As a business interested in making money and not stirring up political discussions, this is a reasonable move.
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