Google disables anti-Obama blogs

Original Link: http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0608/Google_disables_antiObama_blogs.html

By Ben Smith

Here's a bit of a cautionary tale on the under-rated power of those "report abuse" or "flag this blog" features that you see on websites (including this one) of all types.

Several anti-Obama, or pro-Clinton, blogs that run on Blogger -- Google's free blogging platform -- have been disabled after somebody complained -- falsely -- that they're spam.

It's a similar tactic to one that's been used on (also Google-owned) YouTube to make videos considered objectionable by various political wings harder to get at; and it's part of a broader, worrisome trend in which features designed to promote community control wind up permitting a form of censorship.

Google didn't respond to my email seeking comment, and I imagine that if the bloggers are persistent, the company will reactivate their accounts. But this would be a handy way to cripple an opponent's grassroots in the final days of a campaign, when a few hours lost can make a real difference, and while an Obama supporter seems to have used it this time, there's no reason others can't in the future.

There's no obvious solution -- community reporting of abuse is the best of imperfect systems. But it also lends itself to its own meta-abuse.

UPDATE: Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich suggests my longwinded free speech defense jumps to conclusions, and that the real culprit here was an errant spam filter. He emails:

We think blog spam is a serious problem and we have spam detection software to try to eliminate it. In this case, 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.