Google Temporarily Shuts Down Anti-Obama Web Sites As Spam

Several anti-Obama bloggers were shut down, and unable to update their websites for a few days this past week. All the web sites affected used Google’s Blogger service, and were identified as potential “spam” blogs by Google. They all received emails from Google that read, “This blog has been locked due to possible Blogger Terms of Service violations. 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.” Most of the web sites were affiliated with JustSayNoDeal.com a web site that opposes Obama. Some of the affected web sites have said they believe this is part of a campaign by Obama supporters to shut them down. They feel the Obama supporters have been clicking on the “flag” feature on anti-Obama web sites which alerts Google that the site is potentially a spam site. On Googles web site they claim “The Flag button isn’t censorship and it can’t be manipulated by angry mobs. Political dissent? Incendiary opinions?” Apparently they didn’t take into account the passion of the current election, or the cleverness of the electorate. Most the affected web sites are back up, or have changed to a rival blogging service like WordPress. On Monday Google issued the following statement; “It appears that our anti-spam filters caused some Blogger accounts to 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. 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.” Here is a short list of the affected bloggers who all seem to have something to say about this incident; Blue Lyon, Come a Long Way, Hillary or Bust, McCain Democrats, and NoBama. Reporter Simon Owens interviews some of the bloggers in an article in Bloggasm, and tries to explain how it was done.
Alan Cosgrove