Google reportedly blacklists ‘Ethereum’ key word on their platform Google Ads.
A developers team doing smart contract security audits, Decenter, originally reported this ban on Twitter.
We are seeing a hard stop on Google Ads containing “Ethereum” as the keyword in the last two days. Is anyone else noticing the same change? Where there any new policy changes introduced @GoogleAds? #ethereum pic.twitter.com/P5XMGphdiV
— Decenter (@DecenterTeam) January 10, 2019
Google Ads’s Twitter profile promptly got to the scene with a de facto policy.
‘Advertisers may promote cryptocurrency exchanges that target the United States and Japan. Hence, you may not be able to run ads which target other countries.’
Decenter clarified and explained their position in regards to the usage of keyword ‘Ethereum’ as being a group of smart contract security auditors, to which Google ads replied with a I-don’t-know-but-did-you-read-the-policy card.
‘Although we wouldn’t be able to preemptively confirm if your keyword is eligible to trigger ads, we’d recommend that you refer to the ‘Cryptocurrencies’ section of our policy on Financial products and services’
Google has a complicated past of a love-hate relationship with cryptocurrency-related advertisement. In July 2018, they banned it for no reason whatsoever but then again in September 2018, they allowed cryptocurrency advertisement in U.S. and Japan.
People were furious on this biased behavior of Google against cryptocurrencies. On a subreddit for this event, people were very candid about the lost neutrality of the search engine.
u/ThePlague won the top spot in the discussion with a red-hot stream of thought against the corporation.
‘Google has various political and economic agendas, and they are quite willing to use their various services to promote their preferences. AdSense and Youtube are notorious for this, but there have been some incidents regarding the play store as well. Despite their supposed corporate “do no evil” motto, they are more than willing to use their considerable power to choose winners and losers in social, political, and economic matters.’
Hot damn!
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Photo by Dominik Lange on Unsplash
