Don’t See Evil: Google’s Boycott Campaign Against War Photography and Alternative Media
Dan Sanchez,
March 29, 2015
Google Vs. Antiwar.com
This may be what Google is doing right now to Antiwar.com, a long-running and popular daily news and commentary site that is strongly critical of US foreign policy.
On the morning of March 18, Eric
Garris, founder and webmaster of the site, received a form email from
Google AdSense informing him that all of Antiwar.com’s Google ads had
been disabled. The reason given was that one of the site’s pages with
ads on it displayed images that violated AdSense’s policy against
“violent or disturbing content, including sites with gory text or
images.”
Of course the images in question were not “snuff,” or anything intended for titillation whatsoever. They were the famous images of
detainee abuse at the Abu Ghraib US military prison in Iraq. Those
images are important public information, especially for Americans. They
are the previously secret documentation of horrific state violence
inflicted in our name and funded by our tax dollars.
They are also eminently newsworthy because they show the government
wantonly generating insecurity for the American public. Such abuse fuels
anti-American and anti-western rage that can culminate in acts of
terrorism. For example, it did just that in the case of Chérif Kouachi,
who took part in one of the Paris terror attacks of early this year
after becoming radicalized by learning about the Abu Ghraib abuses.
Indeed many apologists for such abuse fully acknowledge this blowback
effect, since they expressly cite it as the main reason for blocking
the release of abuse photos. Of course they ignore the fact that this
danger they acknowledge is an excellent reason not to commit such abuses
in the first place. And they are naïve if they really
think word wouldn’t get out about such abuses among Iraqis and Muslims
in general even without the photos. The dissemination of such photos
chiefly serves to ultimately make terrorist attacks less likely by driving a disgusted American public to demand an end to such terrorism-inducing abuses.
The newsworthy nature of the photos made no difference to Google; or
it made altogether the wrong kind of difference. Either way, they were
considered non-compliant, and so Antiwar.com’s AdSense account, along
with its revenue, were suspended immediately.
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