Google Freezing Anti-Obama Bloggers’ Accounts?

November 12, 2008 at 1:14 pm · Filed under News and Current Affairs ·Tagged Anti-Obama, Barack Obama, Blog, blogger, Blogging, Blogs, Google, Hilary Clinton, Internet, presidential election, spam filters

Anti-Obama Democrat bloggers who opposed in his nomination for the presidency suspects that Obama’s supporters, along with the assistance from Google, have incorrectly flagged their blogs as spam sites by Blogger.

Google says that the blocking of seven blogs for five days last month was an automated response from a spam filter. It is known that Blogger is a hosting service that Google owned since 2003.

But the owners of the blogs believe that Web surfers who are supporters of Obama actually took advantage of the loophole in the system. The loophole that is meant is that Blogger’s system allows readers to report spam blogs.

Carissa Snedeker, who blogs BlueLyon, one of those that were frozen, said that “It appears that [Blogger’s] policy can be manipulated by people determined to shut down the free exchange of ideas.” She also added that “The conclusion that many of us came to was that we were specifically targeted by some over-enthusiastic Obama supporters.”

Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of the tech site SearchEngineLand.com, also took notice of the case. “It’s unusual — I’ve never heard of similar blogs of the same nature being shut down like that,” he said. He also expects more blogs to get shut down if there had been a concerted effort to stop anti-Obama sites. “I think that there’s something weird, in general, that all these were shut down,” he added, “but why, exactly, is uncertain.”

Google, upon their press release, wrote that, “We believe this may have been caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the ‘Just Say No Deal’ network of [anti-Obama] blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam,” referring to the seven blogs which opposes Barack Obama’s candidacy. Blogger has quarantined thses seven anti-Obama blogs on June 25 while it conducted a review for five days, making it impossible for the bloggers to write posts on the joint weekend event held by both parties of Obama and Hilary Clinton.

GeekLove said she felt silenced by the freeze. She wrote on her site, Come a Long Way, that “Blogger’s ‘guilty until proven innocent’ approach is appalling.”

Google also wrote 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.” The press release also addresses the issue saying that Google is “constantly evaluating [our] policies and technology to reduce the number of false positives caught by our spam filters.”

However, the bloggers are unsatisfied with Google’s gestures. Snedeker wrote in her blog that “How’s about a little benefit of the doubt for the next set of bloggers that get caught in your ‘automated spam detection’ maze?”

The other affected blogs are Hillary or Bust, McCain Democrats, NObama Blog, The Political Lizard and Reflections in Tyme.

As a result of the issue, all seven bloggers opened accounts with WordPress, a rival blog-hosting site, hoping to avoid such problems.

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