CV NEWS FEED // In the days leading up to Election Day, YouTube limited CatholicVote’s new ad campaign showing Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris posing with a well-known member of the drag troupe the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (SPI), an anti-Catholic hate group.
Google, YouTube’s parent company, claimed the ad buy violated its “Improper Content” policy, which restricts the scope of content deemed “suggestive or inappropriate.” The ad debuted a week ago.
As CatholicVote previously noted, its 30-second ad shows “a montage of multiple clips of SPI members dressed in lewd costumes mocking nuns and performing sexually suggestive dances on a cross.”
The montage is followed by a voiceover stating, “Kamala Harris stands with they/them. Not with you. Christians can’t stay home November 5.”
Damien Kelly, digital ads analyst at Frontline Strategies, a digital marketing and fundraising agency, shared with CatholicVote an email he received from a Google ads strategist on Monday morning.
The employee wrote to Kelly that CatholicVote’s ad campaign highlighting Harris’ ties to the anti-Catholic hate group violated “YouTube Ad Requirements for Improper Content” as well as another “policy issue” concerning “Election Advertising in the United States.”
“YouTube has specific guidelines to ensure that ads are appropriate for all audiences,” the employee specified. “Content that may be considered suggestive or inappropriate—such as videos featuring a shirtless man with face paint—can trigger these restrictions.”
“Interestingly, even with these limitations, your ads were still displayed,” the Google ads strategist continued. “This is likely due to bidding with a higher budget, which allowed them to reach a broader audience despite the restrictions.”
Then on Monday evening, another Google employee reached out to Kelly noting that the ads were “correctly disapproved due to” the Improper Content policy.
She specified that Google found the ad is showing “Adult content promotions where the majority of the ad is focused on nudity or sexual topics,” and implied that the ad promotes “dating using sexually-explicit imagery or language.”
She added that the ads were “already approved for Election advertising in the United States,” but CatholicVote needed to resubmit them.
Kelly told CatholicVote: “We were running a couple campaigns on different platforms,” including Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) and X (formerly Twitter).
“With the campaigns doing well on both those platforms, CatholicVote had reached out about doing an additional spend on YouTube to get this out to a larger audience,” he added, “to optimize getting voters out that are Catholic-leaning.”
At the time, CatholicVote and Kelly’s company agreed, “We’re doing great, let’s try to broaden our audience out some more. YouTube could be a really good opportunity to get this out,” Kelly recounted. “It’s extremely important and it could definitely decide a few votes.”
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Kelly said he then initiated a $50,000 ad buy on YouTube for CatholicVote’s ads campaign targeting the seven battleground states.
“Those campaigns were delivered on November 1,” he said. Kelly added that while the ads were as of Monday evening “actively running” before videos on YouTube, they are “limited to a very small audience” due to the claimed Google policy violation.
He indicated that Google flagged the ad campaign within hours.
Kelly questioned, “If there’s a policy violation for improper content then why isn’t the ad closed altogether? Why is it only being shown to a limited audience?”
CatholicVote President Brian Burch remarked: “The irony and hypocrisy of YouTube’s decision are evident.”
“The video of semi-naked men dressed as women, which we used in our ad to show the democratic candidate with the anti-Catholic ‘Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,’ was sourced directly from YouTube itself,” he noted. “In other words, those men being gross and indecent is okay by YouTube’s standards, but us opposing it is not.”
