Slightly different topic, but Google also suspended our company's adwords account, I believe for using keywords related to COVID-19.
The business is an American manufacturer that added capacity to manufacture PPE to make up for the lack of Chinese supply. Since we were supplying direct to the market, the prices of the PPE were in-market from before COVID times, or cheaper. We weren't out to make a killing, just to fill up some manufacturing time and help folks out. We had the equipment, the people, the facility.
However, we didn't have a great way to reach people who needed it - healthcare was not our normal industry - so we decided to put it up on Adwords.
Within 24 hours, the account was suspended. We appealed it (thinking it must have been a mistake), and a month later, they told us they reviewed it and maintained the suspension. We told them we were only promoting PPE to help people in health care find supply and they didn't care. We've never had suspension issues before.
The whole experience left a very negative taste for Google. With their extreme dominance in market share for advertising, they no longer need to cater to customers' needs. (Maybe they care if you're a multimillion dollar customer, but certainly not if you're an everyday SME manfuacturer.) And there's not a lot of alternatives to turn to for that type of advertising. There was no recourse, no discussion, no reasoning. Just the Google blank wall.
We wound up manufacturing lots of it anyway to hospitals in need, but Google actively tried to stop distribution of American-made PPE during the pandemic.
> "Google actively tried to stop distribution of American-made PPE during the pandemic."
This sounds like a great headline to shine some light on Google's banning practices. Some bad PR may help them reconsider their lack of customer service.
Considering the mainstream press like NYT love to attack the tech industry/silicon valley, I'm surprised they haven't zeroed in on this one yet.
I guess much like mass-surveillance before Snowden, we in the tech-world are the only ones who know how bad it really is and why that is so dangerous.
Great headline.
Shame there won't be any ads put on that article to pay any of the staff. Another one of the problems that comes from a near-monopoly.
Writing a letter about this to some representatives in Washington might resonate well
Welcome to the club. Don't get your hopes up getting the ban lifted. Had my startup AdWords account banned because we developed dApps using Solidity and Google didn't like Ethereum at the time.
After countless email replies from "Emily" - the Google support bot, and actual phone hangups from the call center, we gave up.
And there are plenty of other examples out there.
Speak with your state attorney general.
Why don't people start lawsuits against them for these unfair business practices? If the damages to your company are small you can even file a local small claims court case. https://kahlerfinancial.com/financial-awakenings/weekly-colu...
Small claims isn't always a cake walk. The defendant can pay to upgrade to general division, turning the somewhat informal case into a full-fledged case.
Small claims and certainly general courts are often (and I think in this case) more about getting the attention of a big company than actually winning. Is google really going to send a representative and lawyer to fight you in either small claims or general over disabling your adwords account when any sane review would conclude that they are wrong? They will 99% just turn it back on. This isn't solving the larger systemic problem here but probably is a great way to get your account reenabled.
A friend’s company was doing something similar and I shared a link to their website on my Facebook. Not an advertisement, just a link to the homepage of a company I personally knew that is making and selling PPE (at normal/reasonable prices, this wasn’t some shady operation). It got taken down for “going against community standards”. I tried to appeal but it was just a black box and I never heard anything back. I feel like tech companies are actively making this pandemic worse even if they think they are helping.
I successfully ran game promoting ads at the end of march, without any limiting despite having "virus" words in the ad. 2 weeks later, the game was released and got banned on Google Play one week after the release.
More story and screenshots here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229073