[hyung]

The pressure to censor content often comes from advertisers. A lot of advertisers don't want their ads showing up next to photos with even minimally offensive content.

(This doesn't explain everything for Google, but I'm sure it was a factor.)

[earbitscom]

I used to work at an affiliate network where an advertiser's ad ended up next to a satirical video for "Tourette syndrome Barbie". Some national Tourette syndrome organization called the advertiser and threatened to boycott them. They pulled the entire campaign from us, despite our ability to make sure this particular affiliate would never promote the ad again. Long story short, knee jerk chain reactions are the norm. Advocacy group or other consumer group overreacts, advertiser is forced to overreact to avoid a boycott or press incident, publisher gets screwed out of a good campaign, picture of guy flipping off nobody is banned forever.

In other words, you're half-right. Don't blame Google. But probably don't blame advertisers either. Blame some overly sensitive consumer group or advocacy group for having no sense of humor and throwing their weight around because they have nothing better to do.

[4ad]

Google maximizes profit satisfying advertisers in my personal detriment. Of course I can blame Google for that. I never care about businesses making money, I only care about my personal comfort and welfare.

[vm]

It's okay for Google to make their site advertiser-safe.

It's not okay for Google to delete the image, without warning or notification to the user. They could have easily reset his profile pic to null and sent him a note.