« BACK  |  PRINT

RS

FRONT PAGE CONTRIBUTOR

Thank You Google for Protecting Us

By: streiff (Diary)  |  August 1st, 2008 at 07:54 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

UPDATE: And were’t not alone. Glenn Reynold’s wife has had her Blogspot blog locked.

Some of you probably know that I live in Maryland. I’m the proprietor of the group blog RedMaryland which fights a daily rearguard action against the forces of corruption and socialism in the UnFree State.

Imagine my surprise to get a notification from Google that I’m running a spam blog and my blog has been locked.

RedMaryland Screen Capture

We aren’t at a loss for suspects on how this came about. And we’re fairly confident that we’ll have the problem solved when Google decides it is convenient to do so.

One of the unfortunate facts of life on the internet is that Google is a law unto itself. The corollary to this law is that Google is a hotbed of slobbering lefties as Chinese dissidents and anyone who’s tried to post an anti-Obama YouTube clip can tell you. As this incident shows you don’t have to violate terms of service for them to screw with you, all you have to do is… is…. use their service.

Tags: , , , ,

COMMENTS

POSTING RULES  |  LOGIN TO COMMENT  |  REGISTER TODAY
  • bk

    how lefties love to talk about the fascist right-wingers, the need for “fairness” in talk radio (but nowhere else), etc.? And isn’t it even more ironic that they want to hit Exxon etc. with windfall profits taxes – how about windfall profits at Google? When you look at profits vs sales, Google is multiples above Exxon.

    • bk

      They hate capitalism, unless it’s for people who are heavy left wing donors or helpers: billionaires like the Google guys or Oprah, actors who get millions per movie or hundreds of thousands per TV episode, allies like Katie Couric making >$1M/month, etc.

      And they hate globalism and free trade, but swoon when Obama waxes poetically about “one world without walls” etc.

      (PS – I thought there was going to be a Kowalski button – this would have been my first time to use it since the new release.)

      • janis

        lobbying for the Opossum’s causes or donating to his Holiness’s campaign.

      • kowalski

        Well if you control freedom of speech in this way, some people I used to know at a law school would call it “chilling.” Do you think Larry Lessig could help? He believes in “more speech”, not “controlled speech”, so I think you should contact him.

        Here’s his blog, maybe you should ask if he can help. I wouldn’t expect a reply, of course, but you can try.

        When I was a kid, I used to listen to Don Imus on my way to school in New Jersey and one day (back in the early ’80s) he had a very young, just-post-Mork and Mindy Robin Williams on for a guest spot, answering the phones. One caller rang in and said: “Robin, I have a picture of you and if I sent it to you would you sign it and send it back?”

        Williams’ hilarious response was: “I’ll try!” [Click]

        I would expect about the same thing from Lessig or anyone from the EFF, or for that matter anyone involved with 1st Amendment issues at the law school I used to work for. If you can find anyone interested in helping investigate this, let me know.

        • kowalski

          Also these kinds of things remind me of the Cold War, when the Russians would send their Tupolevs to test our airspace defenses — you know, how soon do we scramble interceptors, etc., etc.

          It’s pretty much the same thing, except this time Google has the technology advantage, and Al Gore is a partner.

          • kowalski

            :( . But it was the right thing to do, and I know Neil did it for a good reason. In the meantime, just imagine yourself Kowalskiing yourself — from that all else follows.

          • kmorrison

            Many Anti-Obama bloggers (most pro-Clinton Puma/No Deal bloggers) were shut down by Google last month. Many ended up moving to WordPress. I question the algorythm used in their news search, and possibly their regular search. Look for some anti-Obama articles that you know have been published on Google News and see how difficult it can be to find them.

            Were anti-Obama bloggers blocked?

            Blocked Sites and A Recommendation for Google

        • Thunder_Pig

          My blog took the hit, too. This is the 5th time I’ve been loaded on the paddy wagon of suspicion of spamming.

          I suggest you have an alternate blog under another google account that you can start up when the ax of suspicion falls.

          You can still post to your sidebar (or I can, at any rate) and I added a twitter widget to keep my readers up to date, and posted a scrolling marquee on the header to give my readers an alternate URL to visit for my blogginess.

          I also have RSS Feeds on the side through which I can still add content.

          I’m moving to a domain of my own in 2009 anyway because I am tired of the constant downtime for maintenance that blogger has been conducting over the past few months.

          I also have my Red State Diary.

          • olderthangandalf

            Google owns Blogspot. As capitalists, they own the servers; they pay for the bandwidth. They let you have an account there for which you do not pay a penny.

            Republicans generally respect private property, and capitalism, and generally are not the party whining that other people should give up all control of how they use their property.

            A lot of people – I mean, a whole lot of people – in the internet business do set up spam blogspot accounts. The game is you set them up, you upload some cheap to get content (maybe scraped from someone else’s site, maybe written by someone in the Phillipines), and put in a bunch of links to sites you want to rank well in Google. (The way Google historically has worked is that it counts the links in to your site, and depending on where they are and the anchor text, that helps your site rank higher in the Google results). You can automate the process, and have hundreds of sites in a few hours. It’s called “Black Hat” search engine optimization; I don’t do it, but it’s part of the internet landscape and it’s no secret.

            To avoid having their search results – which are, after all, the crown jewel of the Google empire – diminished by spam that they themselves host on their own servers, Google does shut down Blogspot accounts all the time. They do it algorithmically, which is how they do everything at Google as a matter of core company strategy. That means no human decided to shut down your site; something about it triggered a software program because it somehow fit the profile of a spam site. I don’t know how they set up that algorithm, but I am pretty sure it isn’t based on whether you vote Republican or Democrat. And, you know what, all of this is set out in those terms of service you probably clicked through without reading when you set up the free account.

            The solution, for a capitalist, is simple. Buy, or rent, your own server. To rent enough space for a site like yours will cost $10 to $20 a month, hardly a barrier to entry. You can even use free open source software like WordPress to run your blog on. Be strong. Be a capitalist. Don’t count on freebies like some socialist college drop out.

            Google won’t shut you down unless you are on a server they own. They may not send traffic to you if their algorithms don’t like your site, but they won’t shut you down.

            We’re all Republicans here. Let’s show some sophistication about how business works and not whine like a bunch of welfare queens when a freebie gets taken away for a day or two.

            One reason Republicans are in a lot of trouble as a party is that, in our day to day lives, we have completely forgotten what it means to live by the rules we say we believe in.

        • ChanceHaywood

          If you don’t want people shutting you down at the drop of a few complaints then you should stop using free services provided by companies like Google.

          Find a host, webhero.com for example, and load up Word Press. If you need help let me know I’d be more than happy to assist.

          • Dan_McLaughlin

            Just because we don’t ask the government to come in and regulate them does not mean we can’t point out that they are using their extensive market power to benefit one side of the debate over others. Especially when pointing that out helps push back against some of their own efforts to lobby the government for favorable treatment and/or market themselves as champions of free speech.

            A private corporation can do whatever it wants on its property (well, within reason) but it can’t then expect that nobody will point out what they are doing.

          • Neil_Stevens
          • streiff

            first, as a person who can do to your account what Google did to me, calling me an idiot is not a real good evolutionary strategy.

            second, blogspot has advantages that other options don’t. It is free. I don’t have to worry about tech support. And on and on. Blogging really isn’t my life and I’m not willing to devote perfectly good beer money to running a website.

          • streiff

            since you seem to be making arguments that I’m not making.

            There is a difference between whining and being a putz by laying down and rolling over for this.

            I think we all understand that Google is a private company. If you can find a place where I say they don’t have the right to do this I’ll kiss your butt and give you an hour to draw a crowd.

            Next time read the post. Please.

          • rstreu

            on just about every level. And, they don’t have an easily abused anti-spam function that shuts down your site with the click of any idiot’s mouse.

            I’m a capitalist, and my capitalist instincts say, don’t use Blogger — they suck. PUMA voters are leaving blogger… maybe it’s time for Capitalists to do so as well. Then, if Google wants to run a slightly more complicated dKos, with just a bunch of Obamanazi yes-men, more power to ‘em.

          • ChanceHaywood

            I don’t care what you do to this account. I know enough to know you could keep me off this site even if you tried.

            As for your rebuttal if you care enough to complain about being locked out on here then you obviously care about the content you are putting up. So take your destiny into your own hands and stop using Blogger.

          • streiff

            taking my destiny into my own hands.

            Google’s blogspot is a huge operation.

            Whether I move or not is not germane. The issue is their behavior.

            There is a difference between whining and publicizing asshattery.

          • Neil_Stevens
          • Mason617

            I agree with you 100% about how Google can do what they will with the stuff on their servers. It absolutely is a private property issue. They could out right refuse to include search results for conservative websites if they so choose.

            However, by the same token, people who dislike their business practices can speak freely about it, inform others, and convince them to go elsewhere as well.

            This is exactly what I am going to do. I am done using gmail, and I will not be using google for search ever again. Yahoo is rolling tons of new stuff, so I don’t think I will be missing anything. Plus, I never liked the gmail interface anyway.

  • Moe_Lane

    And if so, does this count as an in-kind donation to the Obama campaign?

  • StephC

    Apples and oranges comparing one type of blog to another type of blog. However, I believe there is also free hosting for wordpress blogs. I use wordpress on my own sites so don’t quote me on that. It’s something I think I saw when looking for support articles on working with the software.

    It just goes to show that nothing in life is ever free, including freedom of speech. If you want to exercise that right, you have to pay for it in hosting fees, softwares used, and hard work getting it going. If you do it on somebody else’s dime, then they have the right to terminate your rights, never mind Google’s leftwing slant. It’s great to be able to point to their hypocrisy but, otherwise, there’s really little you can do about it.

    • The_Gadfly

      It has to do with whether or not they are engaging in false advertising. Google advertises themselves as opinion neutral, all run on scientific algorithms and never being interfered with by prejudicial humans.

      I’ve been to Streiff’s site (although I haven’t registered). It’s not a spam site and I saw nothing there that fits a spam profile. Streiff has presented several pieces of evidence that are at least sufficient cause for concern that Google’s allegedly pure policies are not as pure as advertised. It sounds like they’ve put their thumbs on the algorithmic scales to downplay conservative positions. Publicizing this sort of thing is the EXACT right course of action to correct that. And it isn’t whining. In point of fact, since Google is a private company, I’m not sure there isn’t a case to be made that Google has violated campaign finance laws by providing camp Obama with what amounts to a campaign donation. Streiff probably doesn’t have the time or the money to press that case, and might not even have standing to do so, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t potentially there.

      • Mason617

        Everyone here knows about google’s practices, their left-wing slant, hypocrisy, and their total acceptance of government censorship (see:China).

        Now they are Shocked! Shocked I Say! when google does it to them.

        I have been passively supporting them by using gmail (until today), but they have been actively creating content that Google can make ad revenue from. Sorry if it is harsh, but it is the truth. By using blogspot, you are generated cash for them.

        To make things worse, some of you seem to be saying (please correct me if I am wrong) that you are willing to stay. That the convenience of using them outweighs the fact that you just said you suspect them of censoring political content.

        Here are some alternatives.

        • streiff

          bingo. n-t

          • Thunder_Pig

            The primary reason I have kept my Blogspot Blog is that it is given priority over other websites in searching.

            As an example, my blog typically has under a thousand visitors a day, yet consistently scores a higher listing on Google’s search results than any local or regional paper, despite them having tens of thousands of visitors.

            That, Page Rank, and the revenue from Google Adsense are what have kept me there this long.

  • theBlur

    There is another mundane possibility. At the top of pretty much all blogspot blogs is a little button called “flag” that allows people to mark a site as objectionable. Given that I once received (accidentally, I am sure) a blast-email forward from a liberal who may or may not be related to me (not important) advising me to help stop the “dangerous propaganda” on a right-wing blogspot site by flagging it as spam, I can guess that if that happened, and enough, uh, “progressives” decided to flag your blogspot site, the computers there at blogspot automatically blocked out your access.

    I don’t say that is what happened, just that I know that at least in one instance, someone tried to kill a blogspot site that way.

    • Slightly_Askew

      It probably wasn’t the algorithms, more likely the Obamasses who use the “Report as Spam” buttons to shut down right wing blogs. Call it Moby v2.0.

      • kmorrison

        Google is in a bit of a no win situation too, in that it has been reported that the spam flagging is why the large number of pro-Clinton anti-Obama sites were shut down; but they’ve also made the claim that the spam reporting can’t be manipulated by the masses. Consequently they’ve said very little, which I don’t think is helping.

        • rstreu

          both are free blogging tools. You can use WordPress for the same things you use Blogger for. I have a WordPress blog, and, actually, a Blogger blog that I maintain for fun. Except for the fact that WordPress has a better built-in community than Blogger does (and a couple other things they do better), they’re basically the same thing, as far as I’m concerned: both are tools for blogging.

          • olderthangandalf

            You have the right to say whatever you want. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

            Here’s the deal – unlike the other guy who posted below me, I’m not going to call you an idiot. That’s not just because my mama raised me better than that, but because I know full well from reading your posts over the years that you are not, in fact, anything like an idiot, but generally a pretty smart and thoughtful guy.

            This particular post, however, does not put you in your best light. It makes you look, at best, a little unsophisticated and perhaps a tad ignorant about how these things work.

            There is nothing in the post to suggest that Google shut you down for ideological reasons. I don’t think you were.

            One of two things happen. Either 1) something about your site triggered the algorithm, or 2) you got flagged by enough people so that an automatic limit got flipped.

            What might have triggered the algorithm? That’s hard to say, since this algorithm, like all Google algorithms, is private, and not so widely reverse engineered as their search algorithm. Maybe you had too many links in the right column relative to content (I expect they do watch for that, because setting links is the basic reason for most spam Blogger sites

            . Maybe too much of your content was quoted from other sites (they also probably watch for scraper sites just repurposing content that originates elsewhere). Maybe some combination of the above.

            Or maybe you just got too many flags, or too many flags relative to the other indicia that trigger their algorithm. If you got lots of flags, they probably were from people who are left wingers, but that doesn’t make Google left wing. It just means that you crossed over an algorithmic limit.

            I think you will find that they will respond fairly quickly to your position that you are not a spam site, and that when they put you back up you won’t get shut down too easily.

            You can, of course, complain that a service you are getting for free isn’t up to your standards of excellence, but in my honest, Republican, old school opinion, the one who looks bad when that kind of complaint is made is not Google.

          • Neil_Stevens
  • WOSG

    my blog is Travis Monitor:
    http://travismonitor.blogspot.com.

    They didnt shut it down, but in early June they flagged it as a potential ‘spam’ site and since then forced us to use word verification on every post. No response AT ALL from the button where you send a request to review. It’s an unnecessary annoyance and inconvenience.

    I like many features of blogspot, and there are reasons not to change, such as ease of use, not wanting to break links to the blog, the fact that hosting is taken care of, etc. and there is one good reason to use blogspot in particular: They show up very well on Google search … but I agree with the concerns.
    If I were doing my own right-wing blog right now, I’d go Blogivists or some other known friendly environment or go free-range.

    Maybe like Redstate 3.0, its time to evolve. but one thing is truly arrogant: Calling ‘idiots’ those of us who in 2003-2004 wanted to start blogging and picked one of the best environments at the time for it.

    • bk

      between offering a service to everyone and turning into a de facto corporate contribution worth mega-$$$ to a candidate.

      • rstreu

        gotcha.

        • Neil_Stevens
          • Slightly_Askew

            Some fool is abusing a legitimate tool provided by google to reduce spam blogs. I think there would have to be a little more evidence such as:

            1) The “Mark this as Spam” feature was added at a time that directly correlates with the increase in right wing blogs.

            2) They make the algorithm public that analyzes a blog marked as spam to determine if it really is spam (not likely).

            3) An attempt to pull the stunt at a liberal blog in the same manner fails (which would be stooping to their level).

            Sorry, I agree with kmorrison. Either the spam flag works correctly, or can be fooled. Google needs to come clean one way or another on the success or failure of this feature. Until then:

            UPDATE [blogs] SET [blocked]=1 WHERE [spamFlag]=1 AND blogText LIKE ‘%obamabus%’

            is no more than conjecture, and blaming the creator for the actions of the user sounds eerily similar to the justification of gun bans.