Picture:Blogger is blocked
Since I published my article about the Anti-Obama blog outages last night the story has exploded across the blogosphere. I probably should have expected this, but I was surprised to find that within hours Blogspot users were announcing boycotts. All kinds of conspiracy theories were launched. Bloggers were using the incident to attack Obama, Google, or both. Free speech was under attack. Nazi comparisons were made. And I think an LOLcat or two weighed in.
I tried to contact Google for my article; no response. But I spoke to New York Times writer Miguel Helft today and he did manage to get a response from the search giant, which he published in this article:
On Monday, Google would not explicitly rebut the idea that it had been tricked but said that the cause of the temporary blockage appeared to be elsewhere. “It appears that our anti-spam filters caused some Blogger accounts to be blocked from creating new posts,” Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich said in a statement. “While we are still investigating, we believe this may have been 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. 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.”
Also, at least one of the affected bloggers got this email today from Google:
Hi there,
On behalf of the Blogger Team, I want to apologize for the recent trouble you’ve had with your locked blog. Automated spam detection is not yet a perfect science, and although we are constantly working to improve our tools, it appears that our filters have caused some Blogger accounts to mistakenly be blocked from creating new posts.
While we are still investigating, we believe this may have been 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. Regardless, we have restored posting rights to your blog, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression.
So once again, we apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience as we looked into the problem.
Sincerely,
The Blogger Team
Their explanation is certainly interesting, and if true it means that Obama supporters had absolutely nothing to do with the Blogspot lockdowns.
I bet a few anti-Obama folks who thought they had discovered Hitler 2.0. might be feeling a little silly right now. Of course Miguel told me that Google wasn’t really elaborating much on this issue, and their claims sound a little suspicious, but wouldn’t it be ironic if they were telling the truth and the blogs were flagged simply because of the mass emailing?
a google Picture
For complete reading material Source: http://bloggasm.com/all-aboard-the-hyperbole-express
June 30, 2008 at 1:41 am · Filed under Politics, blog criticism
Carissa Snedeker had created her blog, Blue Lyon, three years ago and up until this point had very few problems posting new content. But this time a message from Google came up when she visited her dashboard.
“This blog has been locked due to possible Blogger Terms of Service violations,” the message stated. “You may not publish new posts until your blog is reviewed and unlocked.”
photo : Carissa Snedeker
When Snedeker clicked on the link at the bottom of the message she came to another one that told her that her blog “has characteristics of a spam blog” and, because of this, it had been locked. It allowed her the chance to send an “unlock request” but told her she’d have to wait up to four business days before someone at Google could review her blog and confirm it wasn’t publishing spam.
Snedeker received an email from another blogger claiming that a number of anti-Obama blogs had been “hacked” that same night. After some digging it became apparent that several Blogspot accounts had been shut down because of similar spam issues, and nearly all of them had three things in common: Most were pro-Hillary Clinton blogs, all were anti-Barack Obama, and several were listed on justsaynodeal.com, an anti-Obama website.
A “Flag Blog” link sits at the very top of every free Blogspot account. If a person finds objectionable content on a Blogspot site or suspects it’s publishing spam, he or she can click on the link and it will send a notice to Google requesting “human review.”
I spoke to several of the bloggers who had accounts locked and every single one was convinced that it was Obama supporters who had flagged the blogs in some kind of concerted effort to silence them. But when I asked for specific evidence of this, most simply pointed out that only anti-Obama blogs were targeted — a fact that is certainly suspicious but not especially conclusive.
A blogger who uses the pseudonym “GeekLove” (she wouldn’t agree to a phone interview and wouldn’t tell me her real name) said to me via email that when her blog, Come A Long Way, was shut down she thought it was a fluke as well.
“I also felt a little bit humiliated that someone would think to characterize my Blog as ’spam,’” she said. “I had no idea why it would be ’spam’ I assumed it was just some sort of mistake. I did think it was an isolated incident. I requested the Blogger review. I then went to the Hillary Clinton Forum, a place I frequently participate in on line discussions, and I saw Nobama’s post ‘Blogger just shut down my NObama Blog!!‘ Then when other Blogger blogs were affected, I knew it was more than coincidence.”
“I suspect that it was Obama supporters because I think the block was timed to affect blogs prior to the unity event so that we would not ‘rain on the unity parade,’ GeekLove said. “Also, Obama has ads out hiring people with no experience, except the ability to use computers. I presume these are the individuals responsible for silencing any opposition. His campaign has really harnessed the power of the internet and in the process learned to game the system in a way that I find frightening.”
When it comes to butting heads with Obama supporters, perhaps nobody has more experience than Larry Johnson. If his name rings a bell, it’s because Johnson, who worked for the CIA in the ’80s and now does military consulting, was the origin of the famous “whitey” claim. Not long ago he reported on his website that people connected with the McCain campaign are in possession of video footage of Michelle Obama saying derogatory things about white people. However, he admitted that he hadn’t actually seen the video and his two sources hadn’t seen it either. He quickly became a target of bloggers from both the right and left.
Several of the bloggers hit by the Blogspot outage also write at his site, No Quarter, and so Johnson has been watching the controversy with interest.
“We were contacted by our host in March and they claimed we were draining too many resources,” he said. “They shut us down completely. But when we went in to look at our site statistics it was evident that something else was clearly going on — we were the subject of some kind of spam attack that was putting a strain on the site.”
To ward off such attacks, he decided to go with his own server, a move that he said would make it harder to shut him down. But after he published the “whitey” claims, he had more direct conflicts with Obama supporters.
“The problem with these people who had their Google accounts shut down, they’re intimidated by it,” Johnson said. “They don’t want to get themselves in a situation so they would be identified. Some of these people who get identified, the Obama folks start picking up the phone and calling. I had phone calls into my office, threatening me, saying that you’re going to be fired, let me talk to your boss. I told them to go fuck themselves, because I am my own boss. It helps to be self-employed.”
Johnson and the other people interviewed for this article all agreed that Google was partly to blame for the outages. It was because of the search giant’s “guilty until proven innocent” approach, they said, that allowed the attackers to shut down the blogs so easily.
“My biggest objection is not necessarily that these people did this, but that Blogger had the policy that basically locks you out,” Snedeker said. “In other words you’re guilty until proven innocent, instead of the other way around, and that was what frustrated me.”
“I understand the need if you have some complaints from people that you need to investigate it,” Johnson said. “But you also have to make sure that the person filing the complaint is legitimate.”
An email I sent to Google requesting comment was not immediately returned. Nearly all the bloggers who were targeted by this spam crusade are not waiting around for their accounts to be restored. They’ve flocked to Wordpress and opened free accounts there (including Blue Lyon and Come A Long Way), and they don’t have any immediate plans to return to their original URLs once the dust settles.
What’s perhaps even more notable is that none of the people I spoke to is planning any kind of backlash against Obama supporters. It seemed to me that, for the most part, they just want to be left alone.
“While I am expressing my political beliefs, on Blogger it was a simple push of a button to mark my blog as spam and silence me,” GeekLove said. ” Pushing the button set me back a couple of days and I was unable to post anything during the unity event. The prospect of starting over on another blog was also daunting [and] I briefly, only briefly considered [giving] up blogging. Tactics like this work to silence opposition, why wouldn’t we expect more of that in the future?”
Contact me at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com
Bloggers readers have many things to comment:
John Samford said,
Hire an attorney. Don’t sue blogger, but the people that posted the spam complaint. You have a right to face your accuser,
If Blogger’s guilty-until-innocent policy is the problem, a perhaps effective response would be to click the “flag blog” button on great numbers of Blogger blogs–making the button useless.
Susan Nunes said, Blogger simply needs to disable and delete the “Flag” function on the top of the blog pages. People would have to email Blogger about spam blogs instead.
.
In any case, moving from Blogger just tells the perpetrators they’ve won.
Sister Toldjah said, Are Obama supporters having anti-Obama blogs shut down on Blogspot?
Just another example of how far some far left Obama supporters are willing to go to shut down criticism about the Obamessiah? Bloggasm and Stop The ACLU take a look.some reader can not believe it!
Is Google, owner of Blogspot, shutting down anti-Obama blogs?
Tantor said,
No longer will you be trouble by differing views of the world. ..
And really, don’t you know these kinds of attacks on free speech is how the Left works? If you put a conservative bumper sticker on your car during election season, you can expect the lefty stormtroopers to tear it off or razor blade it up. It happenned to me a couple times in different parts of the country and its happenned to other people. The Left wants a monopoly on all public forums. This kind of factional fight is akin to the Nazis attacking their rival Communist demonstrations back in the 1930s Germany.
John Samford: part of the problem here is that some of these bloggers want to remain anonymous. By confronting the attackers directly, they reveal their identity. That makes it very difficult for some of these folks to fight back.
Howard Hirsch said, June 30, 2008 Simon–
I am the Republican party chairman in Lyon County, Carissa’s base. I have known her for four years, ….
As pernicious as the liberal agenda is, it might be time for us on the other side to admit that its followers constitute a sizeable force, if not majority opinion in America today. That may be unfortunate (at least to me), but what is far more dangerous is that it intends to be the ONLY permissible opinion in America today. It will be interesting to see how an Obama Administration, sworn to defend the First Amendment, instead upholds some vague and unwritten “right not to be offended”.
Howard Hirsch, Chairman, Lyon County Republican Party Dayton, Nevada
PorkBomb said,
June 30, 2008 @ 5:11 pm
There are people being tortured in Chinese prisons right now because Google turned them in to the Chinese government. Many people seem to forget that.
Google is openly leftist. I have no doubt that they would aid and abet the elimination of opposition to the left’s messiah, Barack Obama. They censor and delete right-leaning videos and comments on YouTube and I’m not talking about raving racist garbage or death threats, I’m talking about people like Michelle Malkin. They do it on YouTube, why wouldn’t they do it on Blogger?
The “web 2.0″ leftists who manipulate and steer information on the internet are the latest and most dangerous version of leftist totalitarianism. Obviously, they are not wearing uniforms and kicking down doors but Google is insidiously evil and it’s time people began facing up to that.
Ellen K said,
June 30, 2008 @ 11:31 pm
I am not a Democrat. I am not a liberal. But I do passionately believe in free speech. And by my definition, that means that even when people disagree with me, they are legally given that right by our Constitution. Sadly, there are people who believe that manipulating campaigns and playing silly games are synonymous with political finesse. What worries me the most is that if these game players win the White House, at what point will they realize that life is not a game? I read the commentary, I find it appalling that an organized effort was used to shut down opposition. I also find it just a little bit scary that the Obama campaign and its subsidiaries think of this as normal behavior. When you look at the news, very little critical attenation is given to Mr. Obama’s views. And if you dare to oppose his views, you are labeled as either racist, a neo-con or backward. At some point someone is going to have to be brave enough to ask some hard questions of this man. I think a reading of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is in order for the media in general. One final question, if indeed this was an organized effort to shut down opposition, doesn’t that make you question what type of candidate would sanction that type of behavior by subordinates? Just wondering.
Hillary or Bust said,
My blog was one of the blogs that was locked down by Blogger on June 26. I have since moved it to my own domain name
An unintended side effect of this juvenile attempt at censorship has been that my blog has actually gotten more exposure thanks to them. This story has now traveled throughout the blogosphere and is being covered by left and right wing blogs. So the final verdict is that their plan to shut us up completely and totally backfired.
That said, I am concerned that certain radical progressives are getting out of control (and I always considered myself a progressive). For more on this, please read:
http://hillaryorbust.com/2008/06/please-save-this-country-from-progressives/
Saskboy said,
July 3, 2008 @ 5:24 pm
Blogger is terrible at enforcing their Terms of Service. I’ve notified them of a series of blogs set up for harassment purposes (which is contrary to their TOS in multiple ways that I listed for them) and they just unflagged the blog, and cited “free speech”.
Source http://bloggasm.com/whos-responsible-for-shutting-down-a-number-of-anti-obama-blogspot-accounts,
Bloggasm is a blog run by Simon Owens that focuses on the media, with an emphasis on online media and journalism. It often features interviews with prominent bloggers, authors and journalists. If you want to request an interview, just drop us a line.
simon.bloggasm@gmail.com
Well, well, well. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Magically, my posting privileges are back. Blogger sent me this email:
Hi there,
On behalf of the Blogger Team, I want to apologize for the recent trouble you've had with your locked blog. Automated spam detection is not yet a perfect science, and although we are constantly working to improve our tools, it appears that our filters have caused some Blogger accounts to mistakenly be blocked from creating new posts.
While we are still investigating, we believe this may have been 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.
Regardless, we have restored posting rights to your blog, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression.
So once again, we apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience as we looked into the problem.
Sincerely,
The Blogger Team
Read complete news source @ http://bluelyon.blogspot.com/
http://bloggasm.com/whos-responsible-for-shutting-down-a-number-of-anti-obama-blogspot-accounts%20%20,
---------------------xox---------------------
All aboard the Hyperbole Express
June 30, 2008 at 10:32 pm · Filed under google, follow-up post
June 30, 2008 at 10:32 pm · Filed under google, follow-up post
Since I published my article about the Anti-Obama blog outages last night the story has exploded across the blogosphere. I probably should have expected this, but I was surprised to find that within hours Blogspot users were announcing boycotts. All kinds of conspiracy theories were launched. Bloggers were using the incident to attack Obama, Google, or both. Free speech was under attack. Nazi comparisons were made. And I think an LOLcat or two weighed in.
I tried to contact Google for my article; no response. But I spoke to New York Times writer Miguel Helft today and he did manage to get a response from the search giant, which he published in this article:
On Monday, Google would not explicitly rebut the idea that it had been tricked but said that the cause of the temporary blockage appeared to be elsewhere. “It appears that our anti-spam filters caused some Blogger accounts to be blocked from creating new posts,” Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich said in a statement. “While we are still investigating, we believe this may have been 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. 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.”
Also, at least one of the affected bloggers got this email today from Google:
Hi there,
On behalf of the Blogger Team, I want to apologize for the recent trouble you’ve had with your locked blog. Automated spam detection is not yet a perfect science, and although we are constantly working to improve our tools, it appears that our filters have caused some Blogger accounts to mistakenly be blocked from creating new posts.
While we are still investigating, we believe this may have been 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. Regardless, we have restored posting rights to your blog, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression.
So once again, we apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience as we looked into the problem.
Sincerely,
The Blogger Team
Their explanation is certainly interesting, and if true it means that Obama supporters had absolutely nothing to do with the Blogspot lockdowns.
I bet a few anti-Obama folks who thought they had discovered Hitler 2.0. might be feeling a little silly right now. Of course Miguel told me that Google wasn’t really elaborating much on this issue, and their claims sound a little suspicious, but wouldn’t it be ironic if they were telling the truth and the blogs were flagged simply because of the mass emailing?
a google PictureFor complete reading material Source: http://bloggasm.com/all-aboard-the-hyperbole-express
June 30, 2008 at 1:41 am · Filed under Politics, blog criticism
Carissa Snedeker had created her blog, Blue Lyon, three years ago and up until this point had very few problems posting new content. But this time a message from Google came up when she visited her dashboard.
“This blog has been locked due to possible Blogger Terms of Service violations,” the message stated. “You may not publish new posts until your blog is reviewed and unlocked.”
photo : Carissa Snedeker When Snedeker clicked on the link at the bottom of the message she came to another one that told her that her blog “has characteristics of a spam blog” and, because of this, it had been locked. It allowed her the chance to send an “unlock request” but told her she’d have to wait up to four business days before someone at Google could review her blog and confirm it wasn’t publishing spam.
Snedeker received an email from another blogger claiming that a number of anti-Obama blogs had been “hacked” that same night. After some digging it became apparent that several Blogspot accounts had been shut down because of similar spam issues, and nearly all of them had three things in common: Most were pro-Hillary Clinton blogs, all were anti-Barack Obama, and several were listed on justsaynodeal.com, an anti-Obama website.
A “Flag Blog” link sits at the very top of every free Blogspot account. If a person finds objectionable content on a Blogspot site or suspects it’s publishing spam, he or she can click on the link and it will send a notice to Google requesting “human review.”
I spoke to several of the bloggers who had accounts locked and every single one was convinced that it was Obama supporters who had flagged the blogs in some kind of concerted effort to silence them. But when I asked for specific evidence of this, most simply pointed out that only anti-Obama blogs were targeted — a fact that is certainly suspicious but not especially conclusive.
A blogger who uses the pseudonym “GeekLove” (she wouldn’t agree to a phone interview and wouldn’t tell me her real name) said to me via email that when her blog, Come A Long Way, was shut down she thought it was a fluke as well.
“I also felt a little bit humiliated that someone would think to characterize my Blog as ’spam,’” she said. “I had no idea why it would be ’spam’ I assumed it was just some sort of mistake. I did think it was an isolated incident. I requested the Blogger review. I then went to the Hillary Clinton Forum, a place I frequently participate in on line discussions, and I saw Nobama’s post ‘Blogger just shut down my NObama Blog!!‘ Then when other Blogger blogs were affected, I knew it was more than coincidence.”
“I suspect that it was Obama supporters because I think the block was timed to affect blogs prior to the unity event so that we would not ‘rain on the unity parade,’ GeekLove said. “Also, Obama has ads out hiring people with no experience, except the ability to use computers. I presume these are the individuals responsible for silencing any opposition. His campaign has really harnessed the power of the internet and in the process learned to game the system in a way that I find frightening.”
When it comes to butting heads with Obama supporters, perhaps nobody has more experience than Larry Johnson. If his name rings a bell, it’s because Johnson, who worked for the CIA in the ’80s and now does military consulting, was the origin of the famous “whitey” claim. Not long ago he reported on his website that people connected with the McCain campaign are in possession of video footage of Michelle Obama saying derogatory things about white people. However, he admitted that he hadn’t actually seen the video and his two sources hadn’t seen it either. He quickly became a target of bloggers from both the right and left.
Several of the bloggers hit by the Blogspot outage also write at his site, No Quarter, and so Johnson has been watching the controversy with interest.
“We were contacted by our host in March and they claimed we were draining too many resources,” he said. “They shut us down completely. But when we went in to look at our site statistics it was evident that something else was clearly going on — we were the subject of some kind of spam attack that was putting a strain on the site.”
To ward off such attacks, he decided to go with his own server, a move that he said would make it harder to shut him down. But after he published the “whitey” claims, he had more direct conflicts with Obama supporters.
“The problem with these people who had their Google accounts shut down, they’re intimidated by it,” Johnson said. “They don’t want to get themselves in a situation so they would be identified. Some of these people who get identified, the Obama folks start picking up the phone and calling. I had phone calls into my office, threatening me, saying that you’re going to be fired, let me talk to your boss. I told them to go fuck themselves, because I am my own boss. It helps to be self-employed.”
Johnson and the other people interviewed for this article all agreed that Google was partly to blame for the outages. It was because of the search giant’s “guilty until proven innocent” approach, they said, that allowed the attackers to shut down the blogs so easily.
“My biggest objection is not necessarily that these people did this, but that Blogger had the policy that basically locks you out,” Snedeker said. “In other words you’re guilty until proven innocent, instead of the other way around, and that was what frustrated me.”
“I understand the need if you have some complaints from people that you need to investigate it,” Johnson said. “But you also have to make sure that the person filing the complaint is legitimate.”
An email I sent to Google requesting comment was not immediately returned. Nearly all the bloggers who were targeted by this spam crusade are not waiting around for their accounts to be restored. They’ve flocked to Wordpress and opened free accounts there (including Blue Lyon and Come A Long Way), and they don’t have any immediate plans to return to their original URLs once the dust settles.
What’s perhaps even more notable is that none of the people I spoke to is planning any kind of backlash against Obama supporters. It seemed to me that, for the most part, they just want to be left alone.
“While I am expressing my political beliefs, on Blogger it was a simple push of a button to mark my blog as spam and silence me,” GeekLove said. ” Pushing the button set me back a couple of days and I was unable to post anything during the unity event. The prospect of starting over on another blog was also daunting [and] I briefly, only briefly considered [giving] up blogging. Tactics like this work to silence opposition, why wouldn’t we expect more of that in the future?”
Contact me at simon.bloggasm@gmail.com
Bloggers readers have many things to comment:
John Samford said,
Hire an attorney. Don’t sue blogger, but the people that posted the spam complaint. You have a right to face your accuser,
If Blogger’s guilty-until-innocent policy is the problem, a perhaps effective response would be to click the “flag blog” button on great numbers of Blogger blogs–making the button useless.
Susan Nunes said, Blogger simply needs to disable and delete the “Flag” function on the top of the blog pages. People would have to email Blogger about spam blogs instead.
.
In any case, moving from Blogger just tells the perpetrators they’ve won.
Sister Toldjah said, Are Obama supporters having anti-Obama blogs shut down on Blogspot?
Just another example of how far some far left Obama supporters are willing to go to shut down criticism about the Obamessiah? Bloggasm and Stop The ACLU take a look.some reader can not believe it!
Is Google, owner of Blogspot, shutting down anti-Obama blogs?
Tantor said,
No longer will you be trouble by differing views of the world. ..
And really, don’t you know these kinds of attacks on free speech is how the Left works? If you put a conservative bumper sticker on your car during election season, you can expect the lefty stormtroopers to tear it off or razor blade it up. It happenned to me a couple times in different parts of the country and its happenned to other people. The Left wants a monopoly on all public forums. This kind of factional fight is akin to the Nazis attacking their rival Communist demonstrations back in the 1930s Germany.
John Samford: part of the problem here is that some of these bloggers want to remain anonymous. By confronting the attackers directly, they reveal their identity. That makes it very difficult for some of these folks to fight back.
Howard Hirsch said, June 30, 2008 Simon–
I am the Republican party chairman in Lyon County, Carissa’s base. I have known her for four years, ….
As pernicious as the liberal agenda is, it might be time for us on the other side to admit that its followers constitute a sizeable force, if not majority opinion in America today. That may be unfortunate (at least to me), but what is far more dangerous is that it intends to be the ONLY permissible opinion in America today. It will be interesting to see how an Obama Administration, sworn to defend the First Amendment, instead upholds some vague and unwritten “right not to be offended”.
Howard Hirsch, Chairman, Lyon County Republican Party Dayton, Nevada
PorkBomb said,
June 30, 2008 @ 5:11 pm
There are people being tortured in Chinese prisons right now because Google turned them in to the Chinese government. Many people seem to forget that.
Google is openly leftist. I have no doubt that they would aid and abet the elimination of opposition to the left’s messiah, Barack Obama. They censor and delete right-leaning videos and comments on YouTube and I’m not talking about raving racist garbage or death threats, I’m talking about people like Michelle Malkin. They do it on YouTube, why wouldn’t they do it on Blogger?
The “web 2.0″ leftists who manipulate and steer information on the internet are the latest and most dangerous version of leftist totalitarianism. Obviously, they are not wearing uniforms and kicking down doors but Google is insidiously evil and it’s time people began facing up to that.
Ellen K said,
June 30, 2008 @ 11:31 pm
I am not a Democrat. I am not a liberal. But I do passionately believe in free speech. And by my definition, that means that even when people disagree with me, they are legally given that right by our Constitution. Sadly, there are people who believe that manipulating campaigns and playing silly games are synonymous with political finesse. What worries me the most is that if these game players win the White House, at what point will they realize that life is not a game? I read the commentary, I find it appalling that an organized effort was used to shut down opposition. I also find it just a little bit scary that the Obama campaign and its subsidiaries think of this as normal behavior. When you look at the news, very little critical attenation is given to Mr. Obama’s views. And if you dare to oppose his views, you are labeled as either racist, a neo-con or backward. At some point someone is going to have to be brave enough to ask some hard questions of this man. I think a reading of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” is in order for the media in general. One final question, if indeed this was an organized effort to shut down opposition, doesn’t that make you question what type of candidate would sanction that type of behavior by subordinates? Just wondering.
Hillary or Bust said,
My blog was one of the blogs that was locked down by Blogger on June 26. I have since moved it to my own domain name
An unintended side effect of this juvenile attempt at censorship has been that my blog has actually gotten more exposure thanks to them. This story has now traveled throughout the blogosphere and is being covered by left and right wing blogs. So the final verdict is that their plan to shut us up completely and totally backfired.
That said, I am concerned that certain radical progressives are getting out of control (and I always considered myself a progressive). For more on this, please read:
http://hillaryorbust.com/2008/06/please-save-this-country-from-progressives/
Saskboy said,
July 3, 2008 @ 5:24 pm
Blogger is terrible at enforcing their Terms of Service. I’ve notified them of a series of blogs set up for harassment purposes (which is contrary to their TOS in multiple ways that I listed for them) and they just unflagged the blog, and cited “free speech”.
Source http://bloggasm.com/whos-responsible-for-shutting-down-a-number-of-anti-obama-blogspot-accounts,
Bloggasm is a blog run by Simon Owens that focuses on the media, with an emphasis on online media and journalism. It often features interviews with prominent bloggers, authors and journalists. If you want to request an interview, just drop us a line.
simon.bloggasm@gmail.com
Well, well, well. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. Magically, my posting privileges are back. Blogger sent me this email:
Hi there,
On behalf of the Blogger Team, I want to apologize for the recent trouble you've had with your locked blog. Automated spam detection is not yet a perfect science, and although we are constantly working to improve our tools, it appears that our filters have caused some Blogger accounts to mistakenly be blocked from creating new posts.
While we are still investigating, we believe this may have been 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.
Regardless, we have restored posting rights to your blog, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression.
So once again, we apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience as we looked into the problem.
Sincerely,
The Blogger Team
Read complete news source @ http://bluelyon.blogspot.com/
http://bloggasm.com/whos-responsible-for-shutting-down-a-number-of-anti-obama-blogspot-accounts%20%20,
---------------------xox---------------------
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