• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 31, 2018

The campaign promoters behind Marsha Blackburn, the Tennessee congresswoman who is running for Republican Senator Bob Corker's seat, tried to buy media to run several campaign videos aimed at search users, but Google blocked efforts and called the content too "shocking." 

The 30-second video, Stop the Mob, shows protesters screaming at Blackburn as she tried to hold a moment of silence for victims of the Pittsburgh synagogue attack. The other 15-second ad also show clips from a campaign event on Sunday. Caught on video, however, some protesters yelled "Marsha Blackburn is a white supremacist!" as well as profanity before being escorted out of the political event. 

“Our advertising policies prohibit ads that contain shocking content, including profanity or swearing. If an ad violates our policies, we remove it," according to a Google spokesperson. "We encourage advertisers to appeal if they feel their ad is mistakenly removed, and we are happy to work with advertisers to make sure their ads comply with our policies.”

Blackburn's campaign had planned to promote the ads on Google Ads, but Google would not approve them for several reasons before making revisions to adhere to the policies, as first reported by The Daily Caller.

Google does run Blackburn's ads. Its transparency report shows all the Blackburn campaign ads that have run on Google since May. The campaign ran the video ad Marsha For Senate, spending between $1,000 and $50,000 for between 10,000 and 100,000 impressions on Oct. 28 and Oct. 29.

Meanwhile, Fox Business called Google's act of not running the Stop the Mob ads, "censorship."

"Google is already under fire for a report out last month that said indeed their search results are left-wing orientated," said Liz Peek, a Fox Business contributor. "Maybe that's because there are just more left wing voices out there, but that's the results of a impartial assessment." 

Peek notes that Google holds about 90% of the search market share worldwide. She said consumers will be okay with that unless they think it's damaging or hurtful." 

MediaPost reached out to the Blackburn campaign and will update the report with any additional news.