A group of educators created a petition holding Google to task for some of their customers in the ad programs like AdWords/AdSense. The petition accuses Google of undermining education because of a number of advertisers showing up in AdSense market prewritten essays and term papers and in so doing, promotes academic fraud and plagiarism.
The petition opens up:
Please help us encourage Google to stop undermining education through their policy of displaying ads that encourage plagiarism and academic fraud through the sale of pre-written and made to order term papers and essays especially when these ads are displayed on web sites that promote education.
Google has something of a history of trying to stay relatively clean in their advertising. The petition points out Google’s policy of not accepting adds promoting alcohol and tobacco products and other things:
Google screens all of its ads for acceptability and they already choose to NOT accept ads that promote alcohol, tobacco, weapons and other things ranging from miracle cures to license plate covers. Google has therefore chosen to accept advertising dollars from companies whose sole purpose is to promote academic dishonesty.
The petition goes on to suggest that if Google doesn’t want to pull the ads outright, Google could create meta-filter using their “renowned engineers” that would help stop the content from a given category from not appearing on a particular site. They suggested this might create a stronger market for Google for certain publishers using AdSense.
Jack Paulus, author of the petition says he ran Google AdSense from his own TruthMapping website until he realized the ad content. He contacted Google and they gave him an answer he didn’t like:
Our site carried Google ads until we found that we could not prevent advertising that is completely counter to our site’s purpose of promoting critical thinking skills (especially among students) and Google replied to our inquiries writing, “we are not currently monitoring for plagiarism sites.” We would like to encourage Google to change this policy.
As of the writing of this story, the petition has 285 total signatures including a number of teachers and professors as well as just concerned citizens. The petition also allows signatory comments as well. A Dr. Heather Hulett said, “As an educator, I strongly urge Google not to allow these advertisements.” Another quoted Google’s motto of “You can make money without doing evil.” A Jeremy Martin said, “I’m a big fan of Google in general, and they’ve done a lot of good things for students and teachers. Let’s hope that they step up here.”
The story has started to circulate a little bit and Threadwatch picked it up. One commenter seemed to think the petition was a little disingenuous, saying:
People who want to cheat are going to find a way, if they don’t see what they are looking for via an Adwords ad chances are you can find it in the SERP’s anyway…
And why isn’t there a petition for MSN and Yahoo as well?
Its a load of bullocks really.
Educators should put more effort into systems to detect duplicated/copied essay papers, then disqualify those who get caught cheating. Surely that would be a better way to spend their time/money/effort. With all those academic brainy people around they should be able to come up with something…
The argument against this comment though is the MSN and Yahoo don’t have the contextual ads like Google does. While they are getting into that business, they are a million miles away from Google’s control of that market.
It will be interesting to see how this turns out for Google. As the petition points out, Google has responded to such measure in the past and one can be certain that Google will want to maintain some standing in the academic community. At the same time, many have suggested in recent weeks that Google might be edging toward the dark side. The petition, toward the end, seemed hopeful they could reach an agreement with Google:
Google’s stated philosophy is that “you can make money without doing evil.” Show us. Google provides a number of outstanding services that we applaud but in this instance they have apparently placed profit over principle.
Google has responded to petitions in the past so please help us encourage them to do the right thing now. In addition to signing this petition please feel free to contact Google directly to voice your concern over this issue at: GoogleAdWords
John Stith is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.
