Did Barack Obama supporters manipulate Google into banning blogs?
Freedom of expression is one of the cornerstones of the Internet, with anything which is above the law pretty much allowed and tolerated. But those freedoms can sometimes be manipulated to cause someone else’s right to express their views seemingly disappear.
The relationship between US Senators Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton has never been exactly great, although it now seems to be thawing a little with Obama being chosen as the Democratic Presidential candidate and Clinton obviously backing him against Republican John McCain. The relationship between the supporters of both Democrats is even worse,with the Internet being used as a battleground over the past few months between the two sets of backers.
Which is why when several anti-Obama bloggers found their Blogger blogs had been shut down by Google recently, fingers were immediately pointed at pro-Obama bloggers.
Most of the anti-Obama blogs were naturally supporters of Hilary Clinton, and found themselves suddenly unable to update their blogs after receiving their own version of the following email from Google, published here via SearchEngineLand:
Dear Blogger user,
This is a message from the Blogger team.
Your blog, at http://comealongway.blogspot.com/, has been identified as a potential spam blog. You will not be able to publish posts to your blog until we review your site and confirm that it is not a spam blog.
Sincerely,
The Blogger Team
The blogs were all associated in some way with the JustSayNoDeal.com website, which completely opposes the election of Senator Barack Obama. According to The New York Times, the blogs affected include http://bluelyon.blogspot.com, http://comealongway.blogspot.com, http://hillaryorbust.blogspot.com and http://mccaindemocrats.blogspot.com.
The bloggers who found themselves classified as spam straight away suspected a coup by Obama supporters. It was thought they had used the Google flagging system to have the blogs classified as spam.
Google claims that its flagging system cannot be manipulated so if this had been the case, it would have been a severe embarrassment to the company. However, Google has now issued a statement claiming that the blogs were flagged by “mass spam e-mails mentioning the ‘Just Say No Deal’ network of blogs”.
It then went on to say that “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.”
Whether Blogger does remain as a tool for free expression isn’t necessarily that important to the bloggers involved from now on as many took the slight on their intentions personally, and have migrated over to the rival Wordpress network.
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