Fake News? Oakland Election Ads Raise Concerns Over Misleading Headlines

Updated 2:42 p.m. Friday

Oakland mayoral candidate Loren Taylor distanced himself on Thursday from recent campaign ads that appeared to show fake news headlines from Bay Area news organizations.

One recent video ad shows a woman in her kitchen contemplating similarities between former East Bay Rep. Barbara Lee, who is running for mayor of Oakland, and former Mayor Sheng Thao, who was indicted on bribery charges after being recalled last year.

At one point in the video, a news article appears with a design nearly identical to The Oaklandside’s website, featuring the headline: “Barbara Lee accused of hiding rental income for taxes.”

The story isn’t real.

An independent expenditure committee called Oakland Neighbors, Businesses & Public Safety Advocates for Loren Taylor for Mayor 2025 and against Barbara Lee paid for the ad.

“I do agree that it’s misleading,” Taylor said about the ad. “I have been consistent relative to my campaign and those that I am directly engaged with, that we will run an honest, fact-based campaign. It’s important that we draw the contrast, we identify what the stakes are for Oaklanders, but doing that in a fact-based, data-driven way, and I encourage others to do the same.”

Taylor made the comments on KQED’s Forum on Thursday. He and Lee are the expected frontrunners in the April 15 special election to replace Thao. Voting is already underway.

Taylor also commented on Google Ads that his campaign purchased that linked to news articles and featured text that resembled headlines but didn’t match the headlines in the stories themselves.

One version of an ad the campaign purchased read, “Lee’s Ties to Corruption — Lee’s Dirty Money Problem⁩” and “⁦Barbara Lee accepted $66k from a bribery-linked family — what else is she hiding?⁩”

Users who clicked on the ad were taken to a KQED story with the headline, “Barbara Lee to Return $5,000 in Donations From Family Linked to Oakland Bribery Scandal.”

“The advertisement is intended to direct people towards the actual source, not replace the headline,” Taylor said on Forum when asked about the Google Ad. “We want to direct people towards that versus replacing, and so the actual article that’s there is what KQED produced and developed.”

The ad appeared in Google search results for users in Oakland for 37 days in February and March, according to Google’s Ads Transparency Center, which discloses it was shown 9-10,000 times at a cost of $2,000-$2,500 to Taylor’s campaign.

By Friday, the ad’s text had changed to reflect the original KQED headline.

“We got the response and we corrected — we no longer put that there,” Taylor said on Forum. “But that was not the intent. Our intent was to direct people towards KQED’s article, and that’s what the ads now sort of focus on.”

Another Taylor campaign ad that linked to a Politico story ran for at least five days in March. One version of the ad read, “Barbara Lee is a Risky Gamble – Barbara Lee = Dellums 2.0?,” referring to the late East Bay Rep. Ron Dellums, who also served as mayor of Oakland after serving in Congress.

In a March 22 statement posted on the social media platform X, Taylor said his campaign’s Google Ad linking to the KQED story did not replace its headline.

“Every political campaign uses Google Ads to advertise. And Google Ads do not replace headlines but instead allow for captions similar to social media posts. Our caption is not meant to replace KQED’s headline — and there is no intention to misrepresent that to voters,” Taylor wrote.

The statement went on: “If the design of Google’s advertising platform is causing confusion with KQED’s original headline, that should be taken up with Google,” he added. “Our campaign will continue to monitor to confirm if there’s actual confusion versus an overblown issue by supporters of Lee and adjust accordingly.”

Taylor’s campaign isn’t the only one purchasing Google ads and linking them to news sites to influence voters.

A group called Supporters of Barbara Lee for Oakland Mayor began running an ad on Thursday that read, “EB Times: No on Loren Taylor⁩” and “⁦We found that Loren Taylor is surprisingly unprepared in his campaign for Oakland Mayor.⁩”

Another ad included the text, “⁦Loren Taylor has failed to build a coalition to govern effectively. No to Loren Taylor.⁩”

Both ads linked to an East Bay Times editorial endorsing Lee for mayor and Charlene Wang for Oakland City Council.

A separate ad that appeared in Google search results for “Loren Taylor” on Friday displayed the text, “Loren Taylor Isn’t Change” and “Vote No on Loren Taylor — Loren Taylor & Sheng Thao got us into this mess in the first place.”

The ad linked to a website describing Taylor as an “ineffective city hall insider who got us into this mess in the first place.” The website disclosed it was paid for by an independent expenditure group, Supporters of Barbara Lee for Oakland Mayor 2025, A Coalition of Business, Labor and Public Safety Organizations for a Better Oakland.

Mailers with similar messaging paid for by the same committee were recently sent out to Oakland voters. KQED contacted a law firm whose phone number is listed on the committee’s campaign finance filings but did not receive a response.

A Google spokesperson said that it’s common for advertisers to link to external websites, including news sites, in the text of their ad.

“The ads in question are explicitly labeled as ‘Sponsored’ so that they’re easily distinguishable from Search results and they also include ‘paid for by’ disclosures so it’s clear to users who paid for them,” Michael Aciman, a company spokesperson, said in an email. “For this type of ad format, the advertiser provides the text in their ad and the ad also links to the original news article in full.”

The ads may have markers indicating that a campaign paid for them, but that doesn’t mean they’re not misleading, said Subramaniam Vincent, director of the Journalism and Media Ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.

A Google user seeing the ad, he said, “may or may not notice that the headline on the KQED story and the framing and the thrust of the story and the findings in the story and the scope of the story are actually different from the conclusion in the campaign headline.”

Still, Vincent said, misrepresentative ads are a reality of political campaigning.

“Misrepresentation is kind of the name of the game,” he said. “Politicians are engaged in making claims against their opponents because their speech is protected.”