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View Full Version : Google Disables All Ads on Antiwar.com (Updated)




twomp
03-19-2015, 01:56 PM
– because we have a page showing the Abu Ghraib abuses.

On 3/18/15 we received a note from Google Adsense informing us that all ads for our site had been disabled. Why? Because of this page showing the horrific abuses committed by U.S. troops in Iraq at Abu Ghraib.

This page has been up for 11 years. During all that time Google Adsense has been running ads on our site – but as Washington gets ready to re-invade Iraq, and in bombing, killing, and abusing more civilians, they suddenly decide that their "anti-violence" policy, which prohibits "disturbing material," prohibits any depiction of violence committed by the U.S. government and paid for with your tax dollars. This page is the third-most-visited page in our history, getting over 2 million page views since it was posted.

To say this is an utter outrage would be an understatement: it is quite simply the kind of situation one might expect to encounter in an authoritarian country where state-owned or state-connected companies routinely censor material that displeases the government.

Is Google now an arm of the U.S. State Department?

read the rest here:

http://antiwar.com/blog/2015/03/18/google-disables-all-ads-on-antiwar-com/

fisharmor
03-19-2015, 01:59 PM
Relax.
The US government is only doing these things because a significant percentage of the population here actually approves of them.
Some of those people work at Google.
Some work in the adsense department.

I'd bet it's back up in a week. Just some petty dictator trying to shape public policy however he can.

Sam I am
03-19-2015, 02:09 PM
Odds are this this is Google responding to a complaint. Assuming that they did this because the state department ordered them to is a bit of a reach.

But then again, it could very well have been people at the state department who filed the complaint(s) in the first place.

muh_roads
03-19-2015, 02:29 PM
I've been in a slow process of disabling Google from my life.

Bought a blackphone...it's the only form of Android I'll accept now.

Brian4Liberty
03-19-2015, 02:36 PM
Odds are this this is Google responding to a complaint. Assuming that they did this because the state department ordered them to is a bit of a reach.

But then again, it could very well have been people at the state department who filed the complaint(s) in the first place.

That.

PRB
03-19-2015, 03:46 PM
because obviously only the State department is disgusted by Abu Graib photos.

Stratovarious
03-19-2015, 03:52 PM
because obviously only the State department is disgusted by Abu Graib photos.

Definition:
"Disturbing Material" , unflattering text, video content, images, that depict US Intelligence practices as they are.


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CPUd
03-19-2015, 03:57 PM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ktz7vc70hZ8

NoOneButPaul
03-19-2015, 05:19 PM
Update: After channels of communication were opened as a result of this article on Gawker, Google has been in touch and will be restoring our ads. Thanks to everyone who wrote in to help.

Good jobs guys.

Suzanimal
03-20-2015, 10:41 AM
– because we have a page showing the Abu Ghraib abuses.

Update: After channels of communication were opened as a result of this article on Gawker, Google contacted us and said they would be restoring our ads.

However, Friday morning I received another demand to remove content from our site. Google has decided this page must be removed.

We have no intention of letting Google dictate our editorial policies.

Original post:

On 3/18/15 we received a note from Google Adsense informing us that all ads for our site had been disabled. Why? Because of this page showing the horrific abuses committed by U.S. troops in Iraq at Abu Ghraib.

This page has been up for 11 years. During all that time Google Adsense has been running ads on our site – but as Washington gets ready to re-invade Iraq, and in bombing, killing, and abusing more civilians, they suddenly decide that their "anti-violence" policy, which prohibits "disturbing material," prohibits any depiction of violence committed by the U.S. government and paid for with your tax dollars. This page is the third-most-visited page in our history, getting over 2 million page views since it was posted.

To say this is an utter outrage would be an understatement: it is quite simply the kind of situation one might expect to encounter in an authoritarian country where state-owned or state-connected companies routinely censor material that displeases the government.

Is Google now an arm of the U.S. State Department?

This is a big hit on our funding. You can bet the boys in Washington don’t like us and would just love to shut us down.

Don’t let them get away with it! We need your help today, and you can do that in two ways:

Make a donation to help us recover the lost revenue. We run this web site on a shoestring, and the money we fully expected to bring in from Google ads now puts a big hole our budget. We simply can’t afford to lose this income – but we’re not taking down the Abu Ghraib page. No way, no how! Please make your tax-deductible donation today.

Contact Google ads and give them a piece of your mind. Tell them that you don’t appreciate their efforts on behalf of the Washington censors and demand that they reinstate us immediately.
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheater Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Telephone: 650-253-0000
You can also interact with Google at their forum
Thank you to all our supporters.

You can confirm that Antiwar.com is being blocked by going to Adsenseblockchecker.


Here is the text of the email received from Google Adsense:

Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2015 05:43:39 +0000
Subject: Google AdSense ad serving has been disabled to your site
From: adsense-noreply@google.com
To: adsense-noreply@google.com

Hello,
This message is to alert you that one of your websites is not currently in compliance with our AdSense program policies and as a result, ad serving has been disabled to your website.

Issue ID#: 33539611

Ad serving has been disabled to: antiwar.com

Example page where violation occurred: http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=8560

Action required: Check all other remaining sites in your account for compliance.

Current account status: Active

Violation explanation

VIOLENCE/GORE: As stated in our program policies, AdSense publishers are not permitted to place Google ads on pages with violent or disturbing content, including sites with gory text or images. More information about this policy can be found in our help center ( https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1348688?utm_source=crs&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=notificationhl=en&answer=105954 ).

VIOLENCE: As stated in our program policies, AdSense publishers are not permitted to place Google ads on pages with violent content. This includes sites with content related to breaking bones, getting hit by trains or cars, or people receiving serious injuries. More information about this policy can be found in our help center ( https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/1348688?utm_source=crs&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=notificationhl=en&answer=105954 ).

Action required: Check account for compliance
While ad serving has been disabled to the above site, your AdSense account remains active. Please be aware that the URL above is just an example and that the same violations may exist on other pages of this website or other sites you own. Therefore, we suggest that you take the time to review the rest of your sites to ensure that theyâ ™re in compliance with our policies, and to monitor your sites accordingly to reduce the likelihood of future policy emails from us. Additionally, please note that our team reserves the right to disable accounts at any time if we continue to see violations occurring.

Appeals
If you wish to appeal this disabling then you can do so by using the Issue ID listed above to contact us via our Help Center: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/113061?utm_source=crs&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=notificationhl=en&answer=113061.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

http://antiwar.com/blog/2015/03/18/google-disables-all-ads-on-antiwar-com/

CPUd
03-20-2015, 11:29 AM
Other thread got moved:

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?471094-Google-Disables-All-Ads-on-Antiwar-com

Athan
03-20-2015, 11:39 AM
Damn that sucks

RonPaulIsGreat
03-21-2015, 09:14 AM
They just have to remove ads from the pages that contain graphic content. Personally that seems fine to me. Why would K-mart want their ad next to a pyramid of naked guys? They wouldn't, so google doesn't want it either.

Natural Citizen
03-22-2015, 02:45 PM
US news website accuses Google of censorship over photos of Abu Ghraib, dead Ukrainians (http://rt.com/usa/243049-antiwar-google-adsense-censorship/)

As opposed to playing “whack-a-mole,” scanning each article for potential violations, Antiwar.com has now decided to break off its contract with Google altogether.

Ben Swann discusses...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDJTR8hEqxE

Natural Citizen
03-22-2015, 02:49 PM
How the heck does Google Ad-Sense get to dictate the terms of controversy in the Information Age? Sheesh. They weasel into everything. Heck, I don't even use Google but I have their stupid cookie tracking everywhere I go just because I read this forum. Facebook...all of that. I think Anti-War did the right thing by ending their contract with Google. More sites should.

specsaregood
03-22-2015, 03:00 PM
I think Anti-War did the right thing by ending their contract with Google. More sites should.

indeed. relevant reading:
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/08/julian-assange/google-and-the-nsa/



Google and the NSA: Who’s holding the ‘shit-bag’ now?


By Julian Assange

The Stringer

August 29, 2013
Email Print
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It has been revealed today, thanks to Edward Snowden, that Google and other US tech companies received millions of dollars from the NSA for their compliance with the PRISM mass surveillance system.

So just how close is Google to the US securitocracy? Back in 2011 I had a meeting with Eric Schmidt, the then Chairman of Google, who came out to see me with three other people while I was under house arrest. You might suppose that coming to see me was gesture that he and the other big boys at Google were secretly on our side: that they support what we at WikiLeaks are struggling for: justice, government transparency, and privacy for individuals. But that would be a false supposition. Their agenda was much more complex, and as we found out, was inextricable from that of the US State Department. The full transcript of our meeting is available online through the WikiLeaks website.

The pretext for their visit was that Schmidt was then researching a new book, a banal tome which has since come out as The New Digital Age. My less than enthusiastic review of this book was published in the New York Times in late May of this year. On the back of that book are a series of pre-publication endorsements: Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Michael Hayden (former head of the CIA and NSA) and Tony Blair. Inside the book Henry Kissinger appears once again, this time given pride of place in the acknowledgements.

Schmidt’s book is not about communicating with the public. He is worth $6.1 billion and does not need to sell books. Rather, this book is a mechanism by which Google seeks to project itself into Washington. It shows Washington that Google can be its partner, its geopolitical visionary, who will help Washington see further about America’s interests. And by tying itself to the US state, Google thereby cements its own security, at the expense of all competitors.

Two months after my meeting with Eric Schmidt, WikiLeaks had a legal reason to call Hilary Clinton and to document that we were calling her. It’s interesting that if you call the front desk of the State Department and ask for Hillary Clinton, you can actually get pretty close, and we’ve become quite good at this. Anyone who has seen Doctor Strangelove may remember the fantastic scene when Peter Sellers calls the White House from a payphone on the army base and is put on hold as his call gradually moves through the levels. Well WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison, pretending to be my PA, put through our call to the State Department, and like Peter Sellers we started moving through the levels, and eventually we got up to Hillary Clinton’s senior legal advisor, who said that we would be called back.

Shortly afterwards another one of our people, WikiLeaks’ ambassador Joseph Farrell, received a call back, not from the State Department, but from Lisa Shields, the then girlfriend of Eric Schmidt, who does not formally work for the US State Department. So let’s reprise this situation: The Chairman of Google’s girlfriend was being used as a back channel for Hillary Clinton. This is illustrative. It shows that at this level of US society, as in other corporate states, it is all musical chairs.

That visit from Google while I was under house arrest was, as it turns out, an unofficial visit from the State Department. Just consider the people who accompanied Schmidt on that visit: his girlfriend Lisa Shields, Vice President for Communications at the CFR; Scott Malcolmson, former senior State Department advisor; and Jared Cohen, advisor to both Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, a kind of Generation Y Kissinger figure — a noisy Quiet American as the author Graham Greene might have put it.

Google started out as part of Californian graduate student culture around San Francisco’s Bay Area. But as Google grew it encountered the big bad world. It encountered barriers to its expansion in the form of complex political networks and foreign regulations. So it started doing what big bad American companies do, from Coca Cola to Northrop Grumman. It started leaning heavily on the State Department for support, and by doing so it entered into the Washington DC system. A recently released statistic shows that Google now spends even more money than Lockheed Martin on paid lobbyists in Washington.

Jared Cohen was the co-writer of Eric Schmidt’s book, and his role as the bridge between Google and the State Department speaks volumes about how the US securitocracy works. Cohen used to work directly for the State Department and was a close advisor to both Condolezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. But since 2010 he has been Director of Google Ideas, its in-house ‘think/do’ tank.

Documents published last year by WikiLeaks obtained from the US intelligence contractor Stratfor, show that in 2011 Jared Cohen, then (as he is now) Director of Google Ideas, was off running secret missions to the edge of Iran in Azerbaijan. In these internal emails, Fred Burton, Stratfor’s Vice President for Intelligence and a former senior State Department official, describes Google as follows:

“Google is getting WH [White House] and State Dept support and air cover. In reality they are doing things the CIA cannot do…[Cohen] is going to get himself kidnapped or killed. Might be the best thing to happen to expose Google’s covert role in foaming up-risings, to be blunt. The US Gov’t can then disavow knowledge and Google is left holding the shit-bag”

In further internal communication, Burton subsequently clarifies his sources on Cohen’s activities as Marty Lev, Google’s director of security and safety and.. Eric Schmidt.

WikiLeaks cables also reveal that previously Cohen, when working for the State Department, was in Afghanistan trying to convince the four major Afghan mobile phone companies to move their antennas onto US military bases. In Lebanon he covertly worked to establish, on behalf of the State Department, an anti-Hezbollah Shia think tank. And in London? He was offering Bollywood film executives funds to insert anti-extremist content into Bollywood films and promising to connect them to related networks in Hollywood. That is the Director of Google Ideas. Cohen is effectively Google’s director of regime change. He is the State Department channeling Silicon Valley.

That Google was taking NSA money in exchange for handing over people’s data comes as no surprise. When Google encountered the big bad world, Google itself got big and bad.

Reprinted in accordance with the Creative Commons license.

PRB
03-22-2015, 03:40 PM
How the heck does Google Ad-Sense get to dictate the terms of controversy in the Information Age?


Oh, they don't get to dictate anything.

1. they're a private company
2. they're paying you, so they get to decide what they pay for



Sheesh. They weasel into everything. Heck, I don't even use Google but I have their stupid cookie tracking everywhere I go just because I read this forum. Facebook...all of that. I think Anti-War did the right thing by ending their contract with Google. More sites should.

Nobody's forcing them or anybody to use Adsense, people use them because they like the revenue, if you can live without it, good for you. There are ways to avoid storing cookies, and you can clear them every so often yourself. Google actually doesn't easily weasel, compare them to any other company that serves ads, I challenge you to find one that

1. pays more
2. has less restriction on your page's content
3. better customer service and reputation of paying on time
4. weasel's less

I'd love to know the alternatives so people can use a better company.

Stratovarious
03-22-2015, 05:21 PM
Oh, they don't get to dictate anything.

1. they're a private company
2. they're paying you, so they get to decide what they pay for



Nobody's forcing them or anybody to use Adsense, people use them because they like the revenue, if you can live without it, good for you. There are ways to avoid storing cookies, and you can clear them every so often yourself. Google actually doesn't easily weasel, compare them to any other company that serves ads, I challenge you to find one that

1. pays more
2. has less restriction on your page's content
3. better customer service and reputation of paying on time
4. weasel's less

I'd love to know the alternatives so people can use a better company.

To each his own I guess, but they sure don't have my interests in mind.

I like nothning about google.

I use Startpage.


I don't like being shaken down with Google add mining , and the auto fill search box is a joke, most people know what they're looking for and don't
need to wait for the text latency to catch up while they mine and guess what you're looking for.

Startpage takes a tenth of the time for me to do third party searches using the google new world order hardware against them.


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PRB
03-22-2015, 05:32 PM
To each his own I guess, but they sure don't have my interests in mind.


No kidding, why would they? Who are you to them?



I like nothning about google.

I use Startpage.


Thanks for the tip.



I don't like being shaken down with Google add mining , and the auto fill search box is a joke, most people know what they're looking for and don't
need to wait for the text latency to catch up while they mine and guess what you're looking for.

Startpage takes a tenth of the time for me to do third party searches using the google new world order hardware against them.


, ,
.

They're utilizing Google's database, so while the searches can't be easily tracked back to the user, it still enhances Google's knowledge of what people look for, how people find sites...etc. All they're really doing is, scraping Google's site, which Google can easily disable anytime.

CPUd
03-22-2015, 07:33 PM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blB_X38YSxQ

Natural Citizen
03-22-2015, 07:34 PM
To each his own I guess, but they sure don't have my interests in mind.

I like nothning about google.

I use Startpage.




I use Ixquick myself. Same group, though.

CPUd
03-22-2015, 07:38 PM
Startpage still uses google search. They just do the searching for you and tell you what the results were.

Stratovarious
03-22-2015, 08:51 PM
...
They're utilizing Google's database, ...


Agreed, that's why I stated:



"Startpage takes a tenth of the time for me to do third party searches using the google new world order hardware against them."


Don't get me wrong, I don't hate anyone for using google , it's just a waste of time for me for 95% of my searches.

Google on if it works for you.


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