Joel Whitney, in the Boston Review, writes about running afoul of Google's content guidelines for their ad-serving program AdSense:
In June 2011, Guernica, an online magazine that I helped to found, received an ominous letter from Google.
“During a recent review of your account, we found that you are currently displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our program policies,” the letter read. Google cited an essay Guernica published in February of that year, Clancy Martin’s “Early Sexual Experiences.” We were given just three working days to change our site or else—the threat was clear—we could lose the income we were making from Google’s AdSense program, which served advertisements on our pages.
We stood by our violation, and our author. In the process we learned the workings of GoogleSpeak, how it can be used to stand arbitrarily with government despots, and how it serves as the Web’s unofficial censor.
Turns out lots of things are problematic: "excessive profanity," say, and "mature content." The rules, notes Whitney, do not seem to be applied consistently. But it's not just dirty stories...
More outrageously, AdSense has been known to ban political activists in the midst of their most pitched battles against state repression. In January 2012 a number of graphic photographs got Sahara Reporters, a Nigerian government watchdog site, banned. One set shows Nigerian police officers manhandling a protestor, Ademola Aderinde. Another shows Aderinde’s pants pulled down from his desecrated corpse. Google dropped Sahara Reporters for violation of the ban on “violent content.” Just as the ban on “adult” material makes no room for literary-comedic exceptions, the prohibition of violent content allows no exception for context.
