CALIFORNIA – US tech giant Google is going to ban online advertisements that promote cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings (ICOs) from June 2018.
The move comes after social media giants Facebook and Twitter started crackdown against cryptocurrencies advertisements on their platform.
The search engine giant announced the move as part of an update to its policy, which will also ban other risky financial products. The policy states that ads for aggregators and affiliates will no longer be able to display “cryptocurrencies and related content.”
Scott Spencer, Google’s Director of Sustainable Ads, said in a blog post that the company has, “updated several policies to address ads in unregulated or speculative financial products like binary options, cryptocurrency, foreign exchange markets and contracts for difference (or CFDs).
“Improving the ads experience across the web, whether that’s removing harmful ads or intrusive ads, will continue to be a top priority for us.”
As part of the update, the company said it took down more 100 bad adverts per second in 2017 or a total of more than 3.2 billion adverts that violated its policies.
Currently, typing in a search query of “Bitcoin” serves an ad to buy the cryptocurrency at the top of the search results page, but after June this year, it will change after the implementation of new policy.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are notoriously volatile and governments are also clamping down on the digital tokens to thwart its expansion.
