Google has blocked ads for a commonwealth-funded STI awareness campaign as “adult content” in a move sexual health organisations say frustrates efforts to share evidence-based public health information online.
The Greens leader, Larissa Waters, told a Senate estimates hearing on Thursday that the tech company’s moderation practices had recently undermined the reach and cost-effectiveness of the national campaign, run by Sexual and Reproductive Health Australia (SRHA).
Google added “STI testing” to its list of sensitive topics in November 2024, triggering an automatic rejection of each ad, causing weeks of delays, Waters said.
“It’s interfering with public health objectives and potentially wasting the commonwealth money … Google’s censoring actually what is a very protective public health campaign.”
Sign up: AU Breaking News email
Daile Kelleher, the CEO of SRHA, told Guardian Australia the organisation had paid Google for their ads to be distributed through its online channels because “we know that’s where young people are and where the education needs to be”.
However, the ad was auto-rejected on 12 occasions and the organisation had to contact Google on 10 different occasions.
As Google attempted to help them get around the filters, “we were told to change some of the wording around our campaign, which would have watered down the message and probably not actually met people where they were at in terms of their STI knowledge,” Kelleher said.
Each time the ad was blocked, it interfered with how the ad system learned the relevant demographic of those who would want to click through to the website, where they could find evidence-based information and have the ability to book a test at a clinic, she said.
During the period Google’s filters were interfering with the ads, each click-through was costing up to $17 per click. Once the filters were sorted and the relevant target audience reached, increasing traffic to the ad, the cost came down to 39c per click, Kelleher said.
It is not an isolated incident as other sexual health topics including contraception have also triggered ads on the site being blocked previously, she said.
“There really needs to be something broader done,” she said. The worry is that filters will block evidence-based campaigns based on legal activities, while “misinformation and disinformation that is able to spread far and wide gets in front of people far easier than our content does,” Kelleher said.
Health promotion ads should never had been blocked in the first place and more needs to be done to fix the situation, she said.
Waters said the issue should be the government’s concern. Malarndirri McCarthy, minister for Indigenous Australians, representing the health minister, Mark Butler, at Senate estimates said she would follow up the issue with Butler as well as the communications minister.
Google was contacted for comment.
