Little Green Footballs and Rightmarch.com are indignant at what looks like an open-and-shut case of political bias at Google Ads. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has an ad on Google that reads –
The Truth about Tom DeLay
Learn about DeLay’s many scandals
and help us clean up the House!
RightMarch, a conservative group that I had never heard of before (and hence do not necessarily endorse), wanted to give the other side, so it submitted –
The Truth about Nancy Pelosi
Learn about Pelosi’s many scandals
and help us clean up the House!
Google refused to run that text, on the ground that, “Google policy does not permit ad text that advocates against an individual, group or organization.”
It certainly looks like a left-leaning double standard is at work here, but let’s remember not to attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by cluelessness. The policy cited by Google presumably doesn’t apply to political ads. If it did, the company would be sacrificing a lot of potential revenue. That is why the anti-DeLay ad was accepted. It seems likely to me that the Google clerk who received RightMarch’s ad simply had no idea that Nancy Pelosi is a political figure. He probably reckoned that this was a personal vendetta;
As, in a rational world, it shouldn’t.
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