A week ago we covered a story about Google pulling its advertising from The Pro Afrikaans Action Group (Praag),and how the site may well go to ruin now that it cannot generate any advertising revenue. You might remember them as the organisers of Red October.

Among other things, Google hinted that hate speech may be one of the reasons behind the discontinuation of their advertising. But the fact of the matter is that the language used on the website just doesn’t really suit Google. Google ain’t got time for Afrikaans.

Praag founder Dan Roodt received an email from Google’s AdSense department which read:

Your ads got disabled as the language of your website is unfortunately an unsupported language.

However, Google also claims that it could not ignore the fact that the site was widely reported to be spreading hate speech. That is, especially after Google was contacted by Facebook-group ‘Speak Out Against the Website Praag’.

Their Adsense policy states that sites with Google ads may not include or link to hate speech – including content that incites hatred or promotes violence against individuals or groups based on race or ethnic origin. “If we discover a site which is breaking our policies we will take the appropriate action,” Google said.

Dan Roodt, whose site stands to lose R10,000, claims that the site was not at fault:

We are committed to freedom of speech but also publishing responsibly within the law and ethical norms. Up to now, we have not received any complaints from readers or members of the public either.

Further, he explains that PRAAG has been a victim, and not a villain.

We will lay appropriate criminal charges concerning this cyber-attack as well as other ongoing attacks on us, our freedom of speech, as well as our right to publish in Afrikaans in South Africa and world-wide.

Good luck, Dan, You’ll need it.

[Source : My Broadband]