International Herald Tribune - Published: July 1, 2008

By Miguel Helft

SAN FRANCISCO: Was Google’s network of online services manipulated to silence critics of Barack Obama? That was the question buzzing on a corner of the blogosphere over the past few days, after several anti-Obama bloggers were unable to update their sites, which are hosted on Google’s Blogger service.

The bloggers, most of them supporters of Senator Hillary Clinton and all of whom are critical of Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, received a notice from Google last week saying that their sites had been identified as potential spam blogs.

“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,” the Google e-mail read.

Many of the bloggers were affiliated with JustSayNoDeal.com, a Web site opposed to an Obama presidency.

In an article that appeared on Bloggasm.com, the reporter Simon Owens spoke with some of the affected bloggers, who said they believed that Google had fallen prey to a campaign by Obama advocates. According to the bloggers, Obama supporters clicked on a “flag” on the anti-Obama blogs to make Google believe that they were spam.

Should that be the case, it would be an embarrassment for Google.

On its Web page explaining the “flag” feature, Google says that “it can’t be manipulated by angry mobs. Political dissent? Incendiary opinions? Just plain crazy? Bring it on.”

On Monday, Google did 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,” a 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.”

Kovacevich said that Google had restored posting rights to the affected blogs and that it was “very important” to Google “that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression.” He gave no further details about Google’s spam-monitoring techniques or how they relate to the Blogger service.

Some of the blocked bloggers have reported that their sites have since become unblocked. But some of them had already moved their blogs to WordPress, a rival blogging service, and remain angry about what they call Google’s “guilty until proven innocent” policy.

“Without any notice, apology, or explanation, my posting privilege has been reinstated,” wrote the author of the blog Come a Long Way, who identifies herself as GeekLove. “As bloggers, it is a good thing we still have choices, and I have exercised my choice to leave Blogger and establish a new home at WordPress.”

Carissa Snedeker, of Silver Springs, Nevada, whose Blue Lyon blog was affected by the temporary freeze, said she did not believe Google’s explanation and that she was still convinced that Obama supporters “flagged” her blog. Yet she is mostly upset at Google.

“What frustrated me was that Blogger didn’t give us the benefit of the doubt,” Snedeker said, adding that she had been publishing her blog on the site for three years. “It would have taken a human five seconds to figure out we are not spam,” she said.

Her blog is now hosted on WordPress.

source: IHT

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