Is it an isolated incident or really happening? Quoted From Peace-Action.inbyron.com

August 2006, reports of censorship by net giant Google still hit my mailbox. The latest is again about Google’s adwords policies – while they don’t censor the search results, they certainly continue to reject any advertisements that draw attention to the practice of war or rather the disapproval of war.

Letter received 11th August 2006 from W.Porter …

The Story in a Nutshell: As the conflict in the Middle East heated up Steve Rosenbaum began to search the web for videos shot by real people in and around the conflict. He found plenty of video citizen journalism and to get the word out he created a channel to aggregate the videos and organize them in a central area. Nice- Great idea! Something Google might have thought of doing since their mission is to, and I quote, “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Rosenbaum : 08-08-06 Google Erases Israel/Lebanon Ads - but why?
Rosenbaum : 08-08-06 Google’s Disapproved Keywords

Naturally feelings run high and one can read comments that reflect widely different viewpoints on the topic of “Is Censorship Justifiable”. There are undoubtedly many ways of viewing the issue. I found the following comments in response to an article (J. Daniels (RealTechNews) about the Adword rejection of Rosenbaum’s site. They seem to me to be representative of the polarisation.

“I have no problem at all with Google exercising editorial decisions over the adwords. It’s a business, and a business transaction, and entirely, 100% their perrogative.” – Kent Bunn. August 11, 2006

“Both Rosenbaum and Porter make it very clear they acknowledge that Google has the contractual right to reject any advertising. The problem is (Google’s) policies are inconsistent … why is it ok for some war videos (to be advertised) and not others?” – Hector Achilles, August 11, 2006

The ‘humanitarian’ ethos just pales against the loyalty to advertising revenue doesn’t it. (sarcasm intended)

 More letters follow on the site…

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