Google Ads are a major source of income for a lot of websites. Recent actions by Google suggest that it will throw its weight around to engage in political censorship of websites that carry their ads. It may not be smart for lefties to rely on that income.

Recently Google attempted to censor Antiwar.com because they publish a page that contains photos of the American abuse of detainees at Abu Gharaib.

Google decided that what is clearly political speech, was instead an example of gratuitous violence and gore, which violates their policies. Here's a excerpt from Google's letter to Antiwar.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_med... ).

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_med... ).

Alex Pareene at Gawker posted an article about Google's actions which got Google's attention. After being called out by an author with a large following, Google sent something of an apology and said that if Antiwar.com would remove the code that allows ads to run on the page with the Abu Gharaib photos, they would reinstate Antiwar.com in their ad revenue program.

Problem solved?

Apparently not. After the attention was off, Google decided that there was another page on Antiwar.com's site that they didn't like this time it was a page that was, once again, clearly political speech, about the US-sponsorerd war in Ukraine against ethnic Russians:

On Wednesday morning (3/18/15), Google AdSense suspended ad delivery to Antiwar.com demanding that we remove our 11-year-old pages that showed the abuse by US soldiers of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib. We publicized this and got a bit of coverage.

Yesterday (3/19/15) Google contacted us and told us that they had given in and would be restoring ad service to Antiwar.com shortly.

However, this morning they contacted us demanding that we remove this article.

Antiwar.com says that it will not allow Google to dictate its content and is looking into finding another ad service to fill in the hole in its revenue stream.

It seems that we are witnessing the elites exercising another tool to purge the public mind of thoughts and information that run counter to the ruling elites' interests. We can probably expect to see more of this sort of thing.