Meta, the parent company for Facebook, is currently running ads for Protect Texas Kids, founded by right-wing extremist Kelly Neidert, to run ads “baselessly calling people pedophiles,” journalist Steven Monacelli reported today (Saturday, Sept. 3) via Twitter. “Meta has allowed these ads to reach thousands of people.”
According to screen caps of the ad — which started running on Sept. 1 and is labeled as “sponsored” and “paid for by Protect Texas Kids” — show that it features photos of the drag brunch held Sunday, Aug. 28, at Anderson Distillery & Grill in Roanoke. Copy with the photos reads “ROANOKE, Texas: Skinny-armed communist John Brown Club pedophiles stand guard outside of a pedophile ritual involving children, with people on rooftops to act as snipers.”
Members of an area John Brown Club did arrive armed at the event to provide security for those attending because right-wing protesters, including Neidert, had shown up to protest the drag brunch and harass attendees. One of the protesters was, in fact, carrying a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire, as Monacelli noted in his report for Dallas Voice on Friday, Sept. 2.
According to another screen cap tweeted by Monacelli, Protect Texas Kids spent between $100 and $199 on the ad, which had racked up between 15,000 and 20,000 “impressions,” with number of impressions being the “number of times these ads were seen on a screen.”
Monacelli also notes in his Twitter thread than in August, Meta “allowed Protect Texas Kids to spend a few thousand dollars on ads that baselessly called people child abusers and reached hundreds of thousands of people.” Attached to that tweet were screen caps of a Protect Texas Kids Meta ad that ran from Aug. 20-28 on Facebook and Instagram that apparently included photos of Mr. Misster, a bar on Cedar Springs Road that in June held a drag event for families with children in the hours before the bar opened to the public. No alcohol was served at that event. Copy with the photo says “Woke child abusers use sheets to hide kids as they usher them into sexually explicit drag show.”
The show was not, by the way, “sexually explicit.”
According to another screen cap, Protect Texas Kids spent $1,500-$2,000 for that ad, which received between 450,000 and 500,000 impressions.
Neidert has been suspended from Twitter after tweeting, “Let’s start rounding up people who participate in pride events” on June 18, the middle of LGBTQ Pride Month. Neidert, who graduated from North Texas State University in Denton last May, apparently founded Protect Texas Kids earlier this year, and promotes her organization as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. Unlike 501(c)(3) organizations, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit “may engage in political campaign intervention activities so long as such activities do not represent their primary activity,” according to NonProfitLawBlog.com.
— Tammye Nash
