Google has finally shut down a blog that posted a death threat against a New Zealand politician.

Cyfswatch, a blog dedicated to attacking the New Zealand Government’s  Child Youth and Family Service (CYFS), was hosted by Google’s free blogging service, Blogger.

Green MP, Sue Bradford, who is advocating an “anti-smacking” bill, was much hated by Cyfswatch and its readers.

“Bradford is a worthy candidate for NZ’s first political assassination – I only wish I had the resources to do it,” wrote one particularly angry anonymous contributor to the site. This threat led to the blog being shut down.

While the blog has been taken down, you can still view the Google cache of the site here, and in any case the blog itself has been moved to here (though at the time of writing there was very little content).

Here are some samples from the cached site. You can see the blog gave a voice to some very angry and distressed people:

“What a joke, I have found [the CYFS] to be incompetent, untruthful, devious, manipulative, they practice racial discrimination, and what they do borders on human rights abuse. What they did to our family was nothing short of victimization.”

and

“These comments whether good/bad or otherwise are free speech and opinion.They do not appear to be a threat to kill, just a wish expressed. This is not illegal.”

and

“This is the clearest evidence yet that the media in Helengrad has been bought. It is official; Blog sites are now a more honest source of news than the state controlled slack-arses on television.”

and

“My granddaughter should never have suffered for the additional two years and I hold the previous Social Worker and her Manager and Supervisor accountable.
Palmerston North office – WAKE UP!!! Your actions can hurt children, as in this case.”

The problem of course, is that while the blog gave a voice to people who felt that they had been unfairly treated, the New Zealand Ministry of Social Development felt that the site was putting its staff at risk, since some posts mentioned the names of social workers.

Following a complaint, Google started censoring posts on the site, but allowed it continue. However, once the death-threat post appeared, Google took down the blog.

Bob McCoskrie, of the Family First lobby group, told AAP and smh.com.au, that Google should not be making moral judgements about web site, and should be targetting peodophiles instead:

“I think there is a major problem if Google are going to start making moral judgments about what should be on websites. There is plenty of more objectionable stuff, like child pornography they should be targeting,” he is reported to have said.

Google was very much between a “rock and a hard place” in this case.

While an argument could be made that the blog gave a voice to disenfranchised people (whether you agree with them or not), making a death threat (I think nominating someone for NZ’s first political assassination can be classed as a death threat), really does go too far.

Google is well within its rights to remove such content from its servers (McCoskie doesn’t seem to understand the difference between the Internet and Blogger, but then again many lay people don’t understand these kind of things). Google does have a wider obligation to the community not to host objectionable content.

And by the way, I’m sure Google does remove child pornography from its Blogger service very quickly, contrary to McCoskie’s insinuation.

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Entry was posted on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 at 3:41 pm under Google, Web2.0.

Read more entries by John Pospisil.
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