Google's Pattern Of Harassment Against Conservative Sites

LET'S BE EVIL!

Internet Monster Turns Against Non-Liberal Websites





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While Internet behemoth Google's motto has long been "Don't Be Evil", recent actions against dissenting bloggers suggest the company is quick to disregard that principle for the sake of partisan convenience.

Long associated with far- left causes, San Francisco Bay Area- based Google would like the public to believe it uses its immense power fairly, but many right- leaning writers would beg to differ.

That's because in recent months, a growing number of conservative sites have found themselves targeted for shutdown by the company, including The Radio Equalizer.

For some time, Pamela Geller at Atlas Shrugs has been documenting the problem. See some of her recent posts on the subject here and here.

In a story picked up by the Drudge Report, today's New York Sun examines the allegations:

Anti-Obama Bloggers Say They Were Silenced

Election 2008

By ANNA PHILLIPS, Special to the Sun | August 5, 2008

Web loggers who are campaigning against Senator Obama's presidential run are accusing Google and Obama supporters of silencing them after their Web logs were marked as spam and their accounts temporarily frozen.

On Thursday, hours after publishing a post about an online petition demanding that Mr. Obama publicly produce his birth certificate, an associate professor of business administration at Brooklyn College, Mitchell Langbert, found that he could no longer access his Web log.

Google's Blogger hosting service had suspended "Mitchell Langbert's Blog," which Mr. Langbert describes as "two-thirds academic stuff I'm working on and one-third politics," until it could verify the Web log was not a "spam blog," or a site designed solely to increase the page views of associated Web sites.

A day later Google lifted the block on the account, but the incident and earlier Web log freezes in late June have led Mr. Langbert and other anti-Obama bloggers to accuse the Illinois senator's supporters of intentionally identifying their blog addresses to Google as spam blogs. They also say the company has reflexively suspended the sites.

"These tech-savvy smart alecks have figured out that if you report a blog you don't like, you can do some damage to a person," Mr. Langbert said.

The story also includes Google's response:

A spokesman for Google, Adam Kovacevich, said in a statement that an overzealous antispam filter was responsible for the blocks.

"We believe this was caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the 'Just Say No Deal' network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam," he said. "We have restored posting rights to the affected blogs, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression."

But how does Google's theory explain last week's shutdown of this site? On Thursday, your Radio Equalizer was also locked out and threatened with permanent site deletion.

While previous posts were still available to public viewing, it was frozen, with no ability to add updates. This came just as yours truly was working on an article to commemorate Rush Limbaugh's twentieth anniversary.

This site has no relationship to those mentioned above, so the firm's official position on the cause of the shutdowns simply can't be accurate. In addition, comments are moderated here, meaning spam is completely absent from The Radio Equalizer.

Is Google simply trying to cover its tracks?

Here's the letter your Radio Equalizer received after being locked out of the site:

Hello,

Your blog at: http://radioequalizer.blogspot.com/ has been identified as a potential spam blog. To correct this, please request a review by filling out the form at http://www.blogger.com/unlock-blog.g?lockedBlogID=(removed)

Your blog will be deleted within 20 days if it isn't reviewed, and you'll be unable to publish posts during this time. After we receive your request, we'll review your blog and unlock it within two business days. If this blog doesn't belong to you, you don't have to do anything, and any other blogs you may have won't be affected.

We find spam by using an automated classifier. Automatic spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and occasionally a blog like yours is flagged incorrectly. We sincerely apologize for this error. By using this kind of system, however, we can dedicate more storage, bandwidth, and engineering resources to bloggers like you instead of to spammers. For more information, please see Blogger Help: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42577

Thank you for your understanding and for your help with our spam-fighting efforts.

Sincerely,

The Blogger Team

P.S. Just one more reminder: Unless you request a review, you won't be able to use your blog. Click this link to request the review: http://www.blogger.com/unlock-blog.g?lockedBlogID=(removed)

If there isn't any spam present at the site, what exactly would trigger a shutdown by their "automatic spam detection" system?

In addition, where is the evidence that liberal sites have also been affected? If this is really a computer glitch, shouldn't some left-of-center sites also become ensnared?

With only one shutdown to date, this site has been relatively lucky. Others have already faced this headache several times.

When will the company come clean regarding its partisan antics?


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