Google Censorship

I got a notification early this afternoon that AdSense was being removed from this blog because of “unacceptable site content”.

Their policy on this is at https://www.google.com/adsense/policies.  The relevant portion, that I apparently violated, has this:

Sites with Google ads may not include or link to:

Pornography, adult or mature content

Violent content

Content related to racial intolerance or advocacy against any individual, group or organisation

Excessive profanity

Hacking/cracking content

Gambling or casino-related content

Illicit drugs and drug paraphernalia content

Sales of beer or hard alcohol

Sales of tobacco or tobacco-related products

Sales of prescription drugs

Sales of weapons or ammunition (e.g. firearms, firearm components, fighting knives, stun guns)

Sales of products that are replicas or imitations of designer or other goods

Sales or distribution of coursework or student essays

Content regarding programs which compensate users for clicking ads or offers, performing searches, surfing websites or reading emails

Any other content that is illegal, promotes illegal activity or infringes on the legal rights of others

Nothing in my content matches any of these rules, so I simply have to assume they’re upset about my negative post about their own competence. 

They might possibly be able to stretch far enough to say that my comment about faking my browser version is “hacking/cracking content”, but I’m not sure that “compatibility mode” in IE 9 to make it emulate IE 8 really counts as hacking.  If they think so, it’s just more evidence of their alarming ignorance.  (You’d think someone at Google would know how to search online for information about subjects….)

So, I have to view it as arbitrary retaliation for saying mean things about them.  No big deal, it’s not like I get enough hits on this blog for AdSense to actually make any money, but it is interesting in a “who knew Google had fascist tendencies?” kind of way.

Of course, now that I’ve linked to something about AdSense, I’m in actual material violation of the rule about not linking to “Content regarding programs which compensate users for clicking ads or offers, performing searches, surfing websites or reading emails”, I guess.  Gotta laugh at that!

(Actually, read the right way, linking to ANYTHING hosted or owned by Google at all is a violation of AdSense policy.  It’s obviously not what they intend, but it can be read that way!)