Australian Sex Party May Sue Google Over Ad Refusal

New submitter niftydude writes "Australian newspaper The Age is carrying the story: The Australian Sex Party has threatened Google with legal action after the search engine refused to run its ads on the eve of tomorrow's Melbourne by-election. It comes after Sex Party ads were blocked by Google at the last federal election because the company — which is typically opposed to censorship — perceived the text as too racy (the ads were reinstated by Google the day before the election). Sex Party candidate Fiona Patten said this time the search giant said it would not approve her ads 'because we have a donate button on our page and we're not a charity.' Don't all political parties allow donations? Is google imposing its own sense of morality onto Australian politics?"

Comments

Re:There is no problem

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not necessarily the case. In some jurisdictions, it is required to give equal access to all political parties. If you will run ads for one candidate in a race, you must give make ad space available to all the other candidates in the race in similarly prominent positions for the same cost.

dom

Re:Grammar Standards Imposition

[Farmer Tim]

It's not "a sex party", it's "The Sex Party"...that is, it's a political party with policies centred on sexual and gender issues, and has nothing to do with putting your car keys in a bowl.

I should explain that Australian political parties usually have deceptive names. For example, the Liberal Party are the conservatives, the Labor Party usually puts everyone out of work, One Nation divided the country before forking itself, and the National Party doesn't field candidates in most electorates. The Greens are pretty much what you'd expect, though until recently their leader was a chap by the name of Brown, so while technically they tried to fit in it was a predictably feeble effort. On the New South Wales state level we also have the Christian Democrats, whose values are hardly those of Christ and is run by a religious oligarch, and the Shooters and Fishers Party, which is a reasonably accurate description but they put the "jerk" into "knee-jerk".

And if you exercise your comprehension skills you'd find the grammatical mistake was on the part of the submitter, not the candidate.

Re:There is no problem

[AliasMarlowe]

Care to point to the Google policy which you claim is being breached by The Sex Party? Some other parties in Australia also have donate buttons on their websites, and there is no sign of Google refusing their election ads.