How Scientology funded the anti-Scientology movement
Exclusive (The Register.) Google has murdered the AdSense account run by one of the web’s most influential anti-Scientology sites.
Yesterday, the search giant cut off all ads served to Enturbulation, a fledgling site dedicated to promoting activism against the Church of Scientology and all its related organizations. This could have something do with the nature of the ads Google was serving. Many of the Google-driven ads funding the anti-Scientology site were paid for by the Church of Scientology.
While going through our records recently, we found that your AdSense account has posed a significant risk to our AdWords advertisers,” read Google’s letter to Enturbulation, a kind of home base for the now famous Anonymous movement. “Since keeping your account in our publisher network may financially damage our advertisers in the future, we’ve decided to disable your account.”
Of course, it’s not Enturbulation’s fault that Google was serving the site pro-Scientology ads. AdSense automatically chooses ads based on a site’s content. And like any AdSense advertiser, the Church of Scientology has the power to ban its ads from individual domains.
Google did not respond to our requests for comment. But it should be noted that the company’s new AdSense policies say that partner sites may not include “advocacy against any individual, group, or organization.”