Publicis Groupe, the French advertising conglomerate that led the 2018 seed round for news blacklist organization NewsGuard, has signed a $2.2 billion deal to acquire LiveRamp, an ad-tech company whose former head of products argued in Forbes that ad-blocking technology was part of the tech industry’s fight against racism. The deal would bring together two companies with a history of support for online censorship.
In December 2020, Anneka Gupta, LiveRamp’s then-head of products and platforms published a column in Forbes under the headline “Tech’s Greatest Asset In The Fight Against Racism Is Inclusive Product Development.” It opens by complaining that the tech sector is overwhelmingly white and male, and goes on to argue that every company should treat “diversity, inclusion and belonging,” which LiveRamp abbreviates as “DIB,” as a design principle rather than a hiring metric.
Gupta then gets specific about what that means for a product like LiveRamp’s. Ad servers, her column notes approvingly, are built with the ability to block ads from websites promoting “racist” content, which Gupta calls an important backstop. Companies should pair that with carefully constructed terms of service agreements and vetting processes for use cases and partnerships. That’s an AdTech firm approving the use of ad-driven censorship.
LiveRamp has never publicly disavowed the article. Its DIB page is still live, describing the effort as a cornerstone of the company’s culture and promising to help disrupt the status quo and contribute to a more equitable future.
Publicis Supported NewsGuard from the Beginning
Publicis was not a bystander during the censorship years. In 2018 it led NewsGuard’s $6 million seed round, announcing the launch through its own press office.
NewsGuard’s pitch to advertisers was never subtle. Its founders described the product as licensing a whitelist of the company’s green-rated sites, sold to brands worried that programmatic buying was landing their ads on what they called fake news sites. Outlets that failed NewsGuard’s assessment were left off it.
Breitbart News has documented that assessment process at length. In January 2019, we reported that NewsGuard had stocked its board and advisory panel with neoconservatives, Obama and Clinton administration alumni, and former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden. A month later, NewsGuard rated the identical Lara Logan podcast story as unreliable on Breitbart News while giving green ratings to the same content on other news sites.
Co-founder Steve Brill infamously went on national television during the 2020 campaign and said there was a high likelihood the Hunter Biden laptop story was a Russian hoax, a claim Breitbart News revisited in March 2022 after the New York Times conceded the laptop was authentic. NewsGuard later downgraded Fox News, and its data was used by the New York Times to attack Truth Social. More recently NewsGuard has moved into training AI systems, and a Washington Free Beacon analysis found it rating Chinese state media as more reliable than American center-right outlets.
The involvement of Publicis ran through the boardroom. Steve King, then head of Publicis Groupe’s European operations, sat on NewsGuard’s five-member board of directors until November 2024. King left Publicis that same month after decades at the agency, weeks after Donald Trump’s election.
The two companies worked most closely during the pandemic. Publicis, whose client roster has included Pfizer, Sanofi and AstraZeneca, partnered with NewsGuard on HealthGuard, a browser plug-in rating online health sources, and on a public awareness campaign called VaxFacts. Publicis Health Media said at the time that the partnership gave its clients access to NewsGuard’s Responsible Advertising for News Segments, an inclusion and exclusion tool maintained by NewsGuard staff that supplied a continuously updated list of sites to avoid funding.
NewsGuard’s other customers included the federal government. It received a $750,000 Defense Department award in 2021 to track misinformation, and separately pressed the European Commission to strengthen its Code of Practice on Disinformation, the voluntary framework that hardened into the Digital Services Act. It also signed deals with rival agencies IPG and Omnicom and with the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, the industry body that shut down in 2024 while under investigation by the House Judiciary Committee.
The Deal Comes Just Months After FTC Decree
In April, the FTC entered a consent decree with Dentsu, WPP and Publicis Groupe barring the three agencies from coordinating to withhold advertising from disfavored websites and platforms. The agencies agreed to stop collaborating on the brand safety exclusion lists that GARM had administered.
“This unlawful collusion not only damaged our marketplace, but also distorted the marketplace of ideas by discriminating against speech and ideas that fell below the unlawfully agreed-upon floor,” FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in a statement at the time
The FTC complaint named this outlet directly. As Breitbart News reported at the time, the filing describes a November 2021 proposal by GARM’s initiative folded “willfully misleading” content into the misinformation category, with Breitbart’s alleged selective use of facts offered as the justification. GARM adopted it. Ferguson’s statement also quoted GARM correspondence dismissing free speech as an extreme reading of a constitution written by white men more than two centuries ago.
Though Publicis Groupe signed the FTC’s decree, its merger with LiveRamp – which has not disavowed its previous stance in support of blacklisting designs in AdTech – is likely to draw scrutiny from the agency.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.
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