Don't be Evil? Ok, how about politicially biased then?
I recieved this email a few hours back:
From: Google AdSense
to: me
Hello Christopher,
Our specialists have found that your account is not in compliance with
AdSense program policies. As a result, we have disabled your account.
We continually review all publishers according to our Terms and
Conditions and program policies, and we reserve the right to disable
publishers or sites that are not in compliance with our policies.
Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team
Obviously I was somewhat puzzeled... but only somewhat. After all, others around the blogosphere have had problems with google inexplicably cutting them off, apparently for political reasons, and I'm generally more offensive to the lef tthan they are.
But I kept an open mind. I sent back a one line question:
From: Me
To: Google AdSense support
Sirs,
Can you tell me how my account is not in compliance with your policies?
And I recieved no response.
And I got kinda irritated, and then I got kinda mad; so a few minutes ago, I sent this out:
From: Chris Byrne Mailed-By: gmail.com
To: Google AdSense
Cc: Sergei@google.com, ESchmidt@google.com, LPage@google.com, MRivera@google.com, Press@google.com, mmayzel@google.com
Date: Feb 8, 2006 12:25 PM
Subject: Re: Google AdSense Account Disabled
Sirs,
Can you tell me how my account is not in compliance with your policies?
I sent that one question to you initially, and recieved no response. Now I am expanding my question.
I have reviewed your ad-sense policies, and I cannot find any point at which I am in violation, unless a subjective reviewer of the site found my content disagreeable politically.
If my account has been suspended because I present a different political view point than the reviewer of my site... well then you might have a small problem.
If you say that I am a hate site, a violent site, or a racist site, I can refute that conclusively; and will do so for anyone who asks. If you say that I have inappropriate content, I can refute that and will do so as well.
I will also point to many sites that present anti-semitic, anti-american, and in general vile and disgusting propaganda; and yet they have ad-sense ads. I can show you sites that depict burning of american flags, and bibles, that have ad-sense ads. I can show you sites that are unapologetically pronographic, and have ad-sense ads.
I can only conclude that this action is motivated by political bias. It is my hope that suspending accounts that are politically opposed to a reviewers viewpoint is the action of a single employee and not general corporate policy.
You are of course a private company, and you may choose to allow your political biases to determine who you do business with; but if you do, be prepared to have all of your conservative and libertarian customers do the same.
If you cannot provide me with a legitimate reason for this account suspension, that is not motivated by a bias against my libertarian politics, my staunch advocacy of free speech regardless of it's potential for offensiveness, or the right to keep and bear arms, then I will be going to the blogosphere and the media with this.
Finally, if you insist on closing my account, please forward the remaining outstanding balance due me. As I cannot log in to my account I can't confirm how much it is, but when I checked yesterday it was only about $40.
Thank you,
Christopher J. Byrne IV
I wonder what the response will be.
Anyone know how to move a blog off of blogger?
Posted by cbyrne at February 8, 2006 12:27 PM
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