I received the following email from our ad service yesterday:
Hope you are doing well!We noticed that Google has flagged your site for Policy violation and ad serving is restricted on most of the pages with the below strikes:
I’ve listed the page URLs in a report and attached it to the email. I request you to review the page content and fix the existing policy issues flagged. If Google identifies the flags consistently and if the content is not fixed, then the ads will be disabled completely to serve on the site. Also, please ensure that the new content is in compliance with the Google policies.
Let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks & Regards,
Here are screenshots of the spreadsheet:
For a full-size/full-resolution image, Command-click (MacOS) or right-click (Windows) on screenshots and “open image in new tab.”
Here are the full complaints about the last two entries, which are truncated in the screenshot above:
That final entry in the spreadsheet illustrates that Google’s demand is capricious, arbitrary, and demonstrably false.1 The URL is for a cross-post from Tom Engelhardt about Chalmers Johnson, Blowback for the Twenty-First Century, Remembering Chalmers Johnson. Johnson was
a mild critic of US foreign policy, and has nothing whatsoever to do with health or health care policy. That creates the appearance that Google regards “anti-vaxx” as a showstopper, and is for some reason desperately applying it to this site, which is not vaccine hostile. Google has blatantly mislabeled unrelated content to try to make that bogus charge.
Needless to say, the Censorship Industrial Complex is now extending its tentacles into commercial relationships. This appears to be going well beyond the “kill a chicken to scare a monkey” strategy of deplatforming and demonetizing particularly strident voices
I am alerting allies and also contacting my lawyer and will keep you updated.
In the meantime, please circulate this post widely. It would be particularly helpful to bring this up in comments in various sites, and alert any publishers that take tips from readers. This is not a one-off. If Google is doing this to a small site like ours, you can be sure there are plenty of others on its hit list.
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1 A stickler can argue that the spreadsheet is not from Google but a document prepared by our ad service to convey information provided by Google. Given that the ad service regularly deals with very detailed ad placement/ revenue information in spreadsheet form, the odds greatly favor it having been conveyed from the Google source records accurately. I am raising objections, not that I expect that to go anywhere.
