Jun 23, 2014 12:00 PM PDT    Text size: 

LOS ANGELES — According to Morality In Media’s latest victory announcement, adult marketers may be facing further restrictions on advertising via search giant Google’s AdWords and Image Search programs.

Following its pronouncement of “a major win” against Verizon last week, the anti-porn group claims that “there is much to be optimistic about,” as it continues to press Google over the company’s long-standing support of free speech rights, seeking to see porn banned from the company’s services.

“I already told you about Google’s change in policy to stop all pornographic ads and ads that link to sexually explicit websites — but this win is better than we knew at first,” Dawn Hawkins, Executive Director of Morality In Media (MIM) and PornHarms.com, told supporters. “We have since learned that this change in policy makes website owners responsible for policing their sites, even if the questionable content is uploaded by a separate user.”

Hawkins hinted at the price of non-compliance with the updated policies.

“If the site owners fail to comply, they lose all of the ad revenue they were generating by allowing ads on their website,” Hawkins says. “This forces website owners to be responsible for what is on the [sites they link to] and gets them to self-regulate much better than before.”

She explains that Google is not only applying its new policy to “hardcore” porn, but also prohibiting ads linking to web pages that contain images or videos depicting strategically covered nudity, sheer or see-through clothing, lewd or provocative poses, and close-ups of breasts, buttocks, or crotches.

Clearly, there is much subjectivity involved in some of these assessments; and while Google has yet to issue an official announcement on these tighter restrictions, MIM is claiming another major victory that places it “definitely at a historic point where the fight against pornography is finally changing direction.”

In appreciation of Google’s submission to its demands for censorship, MIM is encouraging supporters to sign a virtual “thank you” card, as part of its effort to galvanize grass-roots involvement in changing the way that private companies do business.

With little counterbalance to the constant cries for censorship, the debate continues, as MIM focuses on having government agencies deem porn to be a public health crisis.