TACOMA — Officials with the Washington State Patrol are researching whether they can block recruiting advertisements from appearing alongside content from the conservative website Breitbart News.
Patrol spokesman Kyle Moore said the agency was notified Monday that their ads were showing up with Breitbart material on Facebook.
A Monday post on a Seattle-themed community on Reddit criticized the State Patrol for the advertisements, which the site’s user said were on the Brietbart website.
Asked why the patrol does not want to advertise next to Breitbart, Moore said, “Not all the content on Breitbart might fit what we’re looking for” when trying to recruit officers who embody principles of “service with humility and serving our community.”
Brietbart is managed by Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist to President Donald Trump. The site has garnered controversy for being a “platform” for the so-called “alt-right,” according to Bannon. The alt-right is a political group that espouses white nationalist, anti-Semitic views.
Moore said the State Patrol has ads on Facebook that are placed with an algorithm partly based on people’s interests. The patrol isn’t targeting Brietbart users, but those users might have shown interest on Facebook in law enforcement or police-related topics, he said.
The ads shouldn’t appear on individual websites, said Moore, who was unsure why the Reddit post appeared to show an advertisement on Breitbart’s site.
The patrol works through an ad firm in Seattle, and Moore said he asked Monday whether Breitbart can be blacklisted.
“I don’t know if that’s the content that we would want to be advertised on,” he said. “I’ll just leave it at that.”
The ad campaign is targeted at recruiting new officers for an agency that has struggled with a shortage of troopers in the past.
Moore said he didn’t know of any other websites the patrol has sought to block in the past.
The State Patrol is not the first to attempt to keep its advertising off Breitbart. The New York Times has reported that hundreds of companies have tried to stop their advertisements from appearing on Breitbart’s website. Sometimes ads still slip through, the Times reported.
