Disney is blocking Senate Leadership Fund (SLF)’s ads highlighting Democrats’ pro-trans agenda and soft-on-crime policies to the majority of their audience, according to documentation reviewed by Breitbart News, effectively preventing the group’s political ads from reaching viewers on multiple streaming platforms.
The group says at least two thirds of its ads in Ohio aimed at reaching voters have been blocked due to Disney’s policy of labeling them as TV-MA, for Mature audiences only. The restriction has also affected ads in Alaska and North Carolina. All three states feature competitive races in which SLF has committed tens of millions of dollars in advertising.
Disney is the only streaming platform utilizing the policy label to block the ads from the wider audiences. SLF says it has led to a loss in millions of impressions and “likely” prevented political advertising from reaching tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
SLF says Disney has the 2nd-largest footprint in streaming behind YouTube for political advertisers, and the policies appear to only be targeting “culture war” ads made by Republican-aligned organizations.
AdImpact, an advertising intelligence company, projected in June that connected television (CTV) spending in the 2026 cycle would surpass $2.5 billion. The company added that it was also the fastest-growing media type in political advertising.
The group’s planned spending in Ohio is aimed at defeating former Democrat Sen. Sherrod Brown. SLF said it budgeted a minimum of $3.6 million through Election Day, but is limited to less than $100,000 per week, with less than $40,000 on Hulu. That has resulted in the group taking a loss of projected spending of more than $2.6 million. The two ads in question both reference Brown’s support for child sex change surgeries.
In North Carolina, a single ad narrated by the father of a murdered college-age woman has been blocked from airing on 75 percent of programs on Hulu, the group said.
An SLF spokesperson said if Democrats were spending similar amounts in those states, they would effectively reach three times the number of voters on the second-largest platform in streaming. A person familiar with SLF’s spending also blasted the preferential treatment towards Democrats by woke corporations like Disney.