Is Google blacklisting the word ‘Ethereum’ on its advertising platform?

Google has reportedly blacklisted keywords mentioning ‘Ethereum’ on its advertising platform Google Ads.

This was first noticed by smart contract auditing start-up Decenter. In a post on Twitter, they said they were “seeing a hard stop on Google Ads containing ‘Ethereum’ as the keyword in the last two days.”

Back and forth with Google Ads on Twitter

The official Google Ads account replied to the tweet stating that “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 then went on to clarify that they are a group of developers doing smart contract security audits and were seeing the error message when trying to use the “Ethereum development services” and “Ethereum security audits” keywords.

Google Ads subsequently responded by saying: “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.”

Taking it to Reddit

Decenter then went on to ask the Ethereum community on Reddit about the Google Ads policy changes.

They reported that “keyphrases such as ‘Ethereum security audits’ were getting impressions until January 8th and then suddenly stopped, showing only this very ambiguous error as the explanation.”

In an interesting observation, they also noted that the “blacklist doesn’t apply to keywords such as ICO, Bitcoin, and EOS.” The Decenter team went on to say that they “also tried VPNing to multiple different countries and it seems that no ads with ‘Ethereum’ in the search term are showing up anywhere.”

Doing no evil

The post received over 550 upvotes on Reddit, with the highest ranking comment provided by ThePlague.

ThePlague responded by saying: “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.”

It’s not the first time we have seen censorship from Google in this space. Just last week, Coin Rivet brought you the story of how Samourai Wallet was disabling features due to Google Play Store restrictions.

ThePlague concluded his comments about Google by saying: “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.”