About a year ago, we read about a ridiculous incident where Google AdSense threatened to completely remove ads from techdirt.combecause they were showing a music video that showed someone dancing around a pole. AdSense's morality police claimed that this story, which was related to a legal dispute over the video, violated the terms of service regarding ad content by containing "strategically covered nudity" and "obscenely provocative poses." Apparently, the company's team is incapable of judging what is worthy of publication according to its stupid policies!
After this news was published, we learned from people inside Googlethat they are trying to pressure the company to simply disable ads on specific pages instead of blocking entire accounts, which is equally pointless since AdSense could very easily fix the terms so that when ads appear on news with similar content, the account is not threatened with closure.
It seems that the ad company's morality police haven't figured this out yet. A week ago, another similar uproar arose when AdSense threatened to terminate antiwar.com 's account after it found photos in an earlier article of American soldiers abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Photos famous for their newsworthy value, but still against AdSense, this time for "violent or disturbing content including text or images with bloody text or images."
As soon as the issue began to gain traction in the press, Google backed down, but only for a few hours before returning with another article with “offensive content” from the same site that featured images of people killed in Ukraine.
The same thing happened with the new threat to techdirt.com, which was threatened for the second time with the closure of its account. Google can regulate the terms and conditions for sites that use the advertising service as it wants, but acting as the morality police, at least on news sites, is deeply stupid and short-sighted. We hoped that Google would convince the AdSense administrators after the scandal, to correct the terms of use, but unfortunately it seems that the big company chooses to play the morality police and try to dictate the choices of each editor.
