Self-censorship

Some time ago I got an AdSense notification that my regular site, Laws of Silence, was in violation of their policies.  Specifically, pornography.  I looked into it and what they objected to was this:

Now, one could argue that this is pornographic, I suppose.  It's certainly salacious and was probably originally used to titillate.  But pornographic?  It's a pretty faithful rendering of  descriptions of a Black Mass.  To me, it's an invaluable historical document.  I didn't put it in gratuitously.  My post included a discussion of Satanic Ritual Abuse and while it wasn't absolutely necessary to the article, the image was important in that it shows how Satanism is perceived -- and misconception plays an important part in the kind of moral panic I was describing.

So, my question was, do I censor myself, or do I drop AdSense?  While I think their take on this is wrong, I do see their angle.  If Google allowed pornographers to use Blogger with ads, they'd be inundated with millions of new blogs consisting of nothing but clips from porn films, xxx photos and ads.  It could go beyond their capacity.  And even if that wasn't a problem, a company giving away a service and hosting it on their servers can decide whatever they want.

I decided the change the image, feeling cowardly, until I figured out what to do next.  In the meantime, I changed the photo to this:

The photo might even be more appropriate to the article and doesn't violate the AdSense policy. 

I kind of forgot all about all this but in the last month or two I had to temporarily bring two other posts back into "draft" status because they too had violated the rule.  Basically, any image of bare breasts breaks the rules.  Google isn't going to fuck about making case-by-case decisions.  They have standard and that's that.  One can always drop AdSense or go some place else.

What I've done is create this blog in order to re-post those articles with images one isn't allowed to use with AdSense.  I don't keep intentionally breaking the policy.  These were posted before I got the first notification.  I'd just forgotten they were violations.

So for the moment any LoS undesirable will be re-posted here and if I do any further posts with explicit images, I'll put it here.