They've also 'banned' all web pages on the site that are related to human sexuality, despite the goal (mostly accomplished) of the site to have high-quality 'non-pornographic' definitions for such terms.
There is no recourse - no way to appeal. You just bend over and comply, lest they block your entire site from using AdSense. When that happens, again, there is no way to appeal: your site is done.
I have 0 love for what Google is doing and turning into, but this article is deeply flawed. Their focus is implicitly on the accuracy rate of Google's actions, yet it makes no effort to statistically demonstrate this. What would matter is not an anecdotal incident, but estimations of the error rate of Google's algorithmic censorship/deranking/demonitization as compared to how human's might perform. Humans regularly make dumb mistakes if not out of misunderstanding then out of sloppiness. Are these algorithmic decisions more accurate, on average, than we might expect of a collection of humans along the lines of Amazon's Mechanical Turk? We can only speculate, but I'd be quite surprised if they were not, but if so that refutes this article's entire premise.
This is one of the biggest problems with advertising driven media. They love anecdotal evidence because we love anecdotal evidence which means the story gets clicks and they get their ad bucks. But it entirely misses the point of issues. For instance here, should the issue be the accuracy rate of Google's behaviors or Google's behaviors themselves and their desired endgame? Their accuracy, as a whole, is almost certainly going to be quite acceptable relative to human accuracy. So consequently you end up targeting them in a spot where they're extremely well 'defended.' By contrast, I think the world Google is trying to shape is certainly not one many would particularly enjoy. And the worst part here is that there is great potential for countless longform consideration and analysis of such a world. But putting out an anecdotal bit is far easier. It's just plain lazy.
Dont blame the machine. Blame those who wish to apply censorship standards meant for film/tv to the entire world. The internet cannot be made pg13. Dont ask the robots to try.
Which advertisers? Google has unfortunately become the trend-setter for one-size-fits-some products, rubbing off on the rest of the industry. Monopolize what you can and turn as much of it into passive income with the least effort necessary.
As the other commenter said, once you're paying for the appeals, it's probably not abuse, and you can get better service because it's not coming out of the other party's bottom line.
If it really costs Google $50-100 per appeal, it would be no surprise that they didn't have humans in the loop, the traffic to this page was probably worth pennies at best, and the company would have just decided it's not worth wasting everyone's time with.
Most scam sites know better...they try to get another adsense account, if possible, when caught. I guess Google can have different tiers of support. Those adjudicating initial appeals need not be Stanford grads, for 95% someone making $20 an hour will do. When in doubt, notch it to the next level.
It makes me scared to think that the government has to be trying to develop algorithms to give advice to people higher up on the military branch about the decisions they should make like in eagle eye.
You don't even have to rely on the failed excuse of "just following orders" if you lose, you don't even have to admit that you "didn't know what you didn't know":
The machine inferred the wrong thing based on nobody's orders, and carried it out despite our wishes. The damn jalopy!
Does anyone know exactly when Google decided to become the pearl-clutching Tipper Gore of search engines? We had a similar problem a long time ago with Google and it seems like it hurt our page rank at the time. There was nothing legislative that would have had any influence at the time, so it has to be coming internally, and from fairly high in the food chain.
They've also 'banned' all web pages on the site that are related to human sexuality, despite the goal (mostly accomplished) of the site to have high-quality 'non-pornographic' definitions for such terms.
There is no recourse - no way to appeal. You just bend over and comply, lest they block your entire site from using AdSense. When that happens, again, there is no way to appeal: your site is done.