Earlier this week we got a message from Google’s AdSense bot (model T-800) about our post on Google’s anti c1ick fraud techniques.

“While reviewing your account, we noticed that you are currently displaying Google ads in a manner that is not compliant with our policies. For instance, we found violations of AdSense policies on pages such as http://…. Publishers are not permitted to encourage users to c1ick on Google ads or bring excessive attention to ad units. For example, your site cannot contain phrases such as “c1ick the ads,” “support our sponsors,” “visit these recommended links,” or other similar language that could apply to the Google ads on your site. …”

We can only guess that our post had too many occurrences of the word c1ick and that this drew the bot’s attention. The bot wants us to change the post and warned “I’ll be back”.

“Once you update your site, we will automatically detect the changes and ad serving will not be affected. If you choose not to make the changes to your account within the next three days, your account will remain active but you will no longer be able to display ads on the site. Please note, however, that we may disable your account if further violations are found in the future.”

We sympathize with the bot. Google’s AdSense policy is reasonable and for the greater good. It’s surely a challenging problem to automatically detect possible violations of it and having a person screen them all probably an expensive solution. We’ve replied to the email, of course, asking a person to look and verify that we are following the policy. But we’ve not heard back and the clock is ticking. We may have to de-c1ickify the post.

UPDATE (5 Aug): We did hear back from the Google AdSense team and our interpretation of the problem was wrong.

UMBC is running a LEGO Robotics Summer Camp for rising 7th and 8th grade students from August 21 - 25. The camp will run from 9:00am to 4:00pm in Room 243 of the ITE building. The cost of the camp is $250. Students will work in small teams with undergraduate mechanical engineering students. The camp will be run by Mechanical Engineering Professor Anne Spence. For more information, contact Professor Spence at aspence at umbc.edu.

Last night’s Colbert Report featured a THE WORD segment on Wikiality, a word they’ve coined for the phenomenon that beliefs can become “facts” if enough people believe in them. An example is the increase in the number of Americans who believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction during the last year from 36% to 50%, as shown by a recent Harris poll.

Back in the 1970’s, Norman Mailer coined the word factoid for the same purpose — to label a manufactured fact that becomes believed through prolonged public exposure.
Another example that Colbert gave is the idea that “Africa today has more elephants than it did ten years ago.” As far as I know, this factoid was invented just for the show. He suggested that his audience could make it so by editing Wikipedia articles. Which is just what some have done to the Wikipedia elephant page, at least until the Wikipedia Tawketbot noticed the unusual editing on 20 elephant related pages and administrators put them in protected status.

The intentional manipulation of consensus beliefs is not new — I’m sure it was discovered shortly after we developed language. I think that this suggests that the Web will help prevent the accidental or intentional creation of false beliefs. Wikipedia remains intact.