Source : THE AGE NEWS
By Calum Jaspan
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An election ad from Clive Palmer’s Trumpet of Patriots political party has been removed by Google for a policy violation, but only after being shown more than 10 million times to Australians in a two-week period.
The ad, which featured a segment from a two-decade-old documentary, was said to expose “the truth about climate change”, said the party that spent up to $200,000 promoting it before it was removed.
An election ad from Clive Palmer’s Trumpet of Patriots political party has been removed by Google for a policy violation.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Earlier this week, University of Melbourne climate scientist David Karoly told the ABC’s News Verify team the ad contained misleading information and claims about climate change. But it remained available online and was being shown to Australians on the mass-market video platform.
It shows a four-minute snippet from the film Doomsday Called Off, released in 2004 by Danish documentary director Lars Oxfeldt Mortensen. While the video has been blocked by Google to be used as political advertising, it remains available to view on the Trumpet of Patriots’ main YouTube page and on its website.
The segment features a scientist, Joergen Peder Steffensen, who specialises in ice core climate research at the University of Copenhagen, saying that, based on his findings, it is difficult to prove 20th-century temperature rises are down to man-made causes, or whether it is natural variation.
The Trumpet of Patriots Party has spent $1,812,600 on YouTube ads alone in the past 30 days, with the ad in question its single largest outlay.
On Friday, Google’s Ads Transparency Portal showed the ad had been removed “for a policy violation” after running for a 15-day period from March 15.
A Google spokesman said the ad violated its policies and was removed as a result but did not answer questions about why it took more than two weeks for the issue to be identified.
Trumpet of Patriots was also approached for comment.
Digital media such as YouTube and TikTok have emerged as a remarkably effective way to get political messaging to the community at scale, evidenced by the ad’s enormous reach, with a relatively small outlay by comparison.
The Australian Labor Party has spent about half as much as Palmer’s outfit across the same 30-day period ($955,000), while Labor has spent more than the Trumpet of Patriots in the past week, with a focus on messaging on the key campaign topics of Medicare and tax cuts.
Last month, Trumpet of Patriots faced a backlash over a series of print newspaper advertisements that declared “There are only two genders – male and female”. The ad, which ran on the front page of The Age among several other newspapers, was labelled dangerous and hateful by several transgender awareness groups.
Palmer later admitted he had fumbled the wording of the statement, instead meaning “sexes” rather than genders, but only after the ads had run.
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