Amazon refunds advertisers whose ads appeared on CSAM sites

Amazon has written a letter to US lawmakers, informing them that the company has refunded all advertisers whose ads have appeared alongside child sexual abuse material (CSAM) without their knowledge. 

This follows an Adalytics report, published last month (February), which exposed several big tech ad systems—including Amazon and Google—of serving ads on sites with CSAM. 

In its letter to senators Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal, Amazon addresses the pressure put on the company to do something about this.

In addition to refunding advertisers, Amazon said it strictly prohibits ads from appearing alongside CSAM and that it has immediately blocked the offending websites from its ad systems. Google has also done the same, but has not clarified if advertisers would be reimbursed. 

Amazon has also taken action to make further improvements around brand safety by increasing URL-level transparency for advertisers and reinforcing controls to prevent similar incidents. 

Brian Huseman, vice president, Public Policy, at Amazon, said: “First, let me be clear that Amazon ads should never be served alongside child sexual abuse material (CSAM). We have always strictly prohibited ads that we serve from appearing next to content of this nature—this was a clear breach of our policies. 

“We deeply regret that this happened and have taken immediate steps to address it and apply learnings. We remain committed to continuing to improve and are currently looking at all aspects of our technology and policies to find ways to ensure that this does not happen again.”

Amazon also said it is working with industry bodies, law enforcement, and third-party vendors to maintain blocklists of unsafe sites.

Additionally, it has partnered with organisations including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to act on reports swiftly.

The company provides AWS technology to NCMEC and collaborates with Thorn to offer free cloud services to help combat online child exploitation. It also makes Thorn’s Safer technology available to businesses via the AWS marketplace.

A number of other companies mentioned in the Adalytics report have taken action.

DoubleVerify announced that it is expanding self-service URL reporting for clients and the IAS has claimed it has offered full URL reporting since 2021, but is encouraging greater adoption. 

This story first appearanced on Performance Marketing World.