Google Stops Personal Attacks Via AdSense

Advertising is one of my "little hobbies", and I always enjoyed following different campaigns, online or offline. One of the things I hate most when it comes to promoting products or people (in electoral campaigns, for example) is when a product or a candidate uses other's weak points in its campaign, and sometimes it all ends up with a "mud battle". The Internet is one of the places where everyone can throw mud at others, especially by taking advantage of the fact you can easily hide behind a nickname, and use a proxy server to access the Web and hide your real location. Well, Google takes a first step in trying to stop such things to happen, at least by using its services...


If you want to laugh at your friends by paying to publish ads with fake facts about them...that could be probably done, but I don't recommend it. Anyway, Google recently changed its policy on political ads published using the AdSense network. Basically, it all gets down to 5 big facts -

1. Each ad must comply with the usual AdSense editorial guidelines (no copyright violation, no violence, no counterfeit goods, and so on).

2. Google promotes ads for all candidates without any discrimination, as it should be normal, but it's good they wrote this down, so none could come and say "hey, this is not right, I paid more than x and got less exposure".

3. "No attacks on an individual's personal life." There are sooo many possible interpretations for this...

4. If an ad asks for donations, the landing page must clearly state the donations are not tax-deductible(what a pity!).

5. Misleading ads are not allowed, so when you click on John Silver's ad, you shouldn't end up on Little Big's page, obviously...

No matter how good may prove these new rules to be in the end, and how well is going to work the third one in practice, I welcome Google's decision. By taking such small steps, maybe one day, the Web could be a much cleaner place than today...