Google Shuts Down Anti-Obama Sites on its Blogger Platform

Publius' Forum ^ | 6/29/08 | Warner Todd Huston

[Mobile Vulgus]

It looks like Google has officially joined the Barack Obama campaign and decided that its contribution would be to shut down any blog on the Google owned Blogspot.com blogging system that has an anti-Obama message. Yes, it sure seems that Google has begun to go through its many thousands of blogs to lock out the owners of anti-Obama blogs so that the noObama message is effectively squelched. Thus far, Google has terminated the access by blog owners to 7 such sites and the list may be growing. Boy, it must be nice for Barack Obama to have an ally powerful enough to silence his opponents like that!

It isn't just conservative sites that Google's Blogger platform is eliminating. For instance, www.comealongway.blogspot.com has been frozen and this one is a Hillary supporting site. The operator of Come a Long Way has a mirror site off the Blogspot platform and has today posted this notice:

I used to have a happy internet home on Blogger: www.comealongway.blogspot.com. Then on Wednesday night, June 25, I received the following e-mail:

Dear Blogger user,

This is a message from the Blogger team.

Your blog, at http://comealongway.blogspot.com/, has been identified as a potential spam blog. 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.

Sincerely,

The Blogger Team

It turns out that there is an interesting pattern where it concerns the blogs that Google's Blogspot team have summarily locked down on their service. They all belong to the Just Say No Deal coalition, a group of blogs that are standing against the Obama campaign. It seems the largest portion of these blogs are Hillary supporting blogs, too.

All I can say is, WOW! If Google is willing to abuse its power like this even against fellow leftists, what does it plan against conservatives, the folks Google hates even more!?

Here is a list of the Blogspot blogs that have been frozen by Google thus far:

...Read the rest at Publius' Forum.com

[Cacique]

Google is a private business, it’s not a public entity. Therefore they are under no obligation to provide anyone with free access to free speech any more than Freerepublic does. They are under no obligation to provide free space to people who don’t agree with them. Better that conservatives now know they are not welcomed there. Better now than later. Time for conservatives to start their own “Google”.

[Blood of Tyrants]

The only freedom you have is what the left says you have.

[Andy from Beaverton]

Are there any anti-Google blogs hosted by Google?

[itsahoot]

MySpace (owned by Rupert Murdoch) shut down the world’s largest atheist group,

My God, don't these people know that Atheists founded this country?

[imintrouble]

You guys are having way too much fun at Google’s expense hahaha...

Don’t stop now - there must be hundreds of great one-liners floating out there..

[ExTexasRedhead]

Obama/Soros will be using their “Brown Shirts” to turn us in. History is repeating itself, big time!!!

[RepublitarianRoger2]

I still use Google's stuff. Hey, they make great tools.

They're not getting a dime from me anyway. 97% of their income is from ads. I use all their free stuff and never click on any Adsense ads. I'm just a leech as far as they're concerned. They can keep making great utilities and I'll keep right on using them while letting them take other people's money.

[maine-iac7]

Does someone have a list of comparable search sites?

[RepublitarianRoger2]

Use Dogpile.com

Dogpile is a metasearch that uses Google.

[RonDog]

Indexing RELATED threads:

Google Shuts Down Anti-Obama Sites on its Blogger Platform
	06/29/2008 1:53:36 PM PDT · by Mobile Vulgus · 45 replies · 1,596+ views Publius' Forum ^ | 6/29/08 | Warner Todd Huston
Nobama blogs kerfuffle (Google shuts down Nobama blogs)
	06/29/2008 3:49:28 AM PDT · by abb · 53 replies · 1,301+ views Buzz Machine ^ | June 28, 2008 | Jeff Jarvis

[RepublitarianRoger2]

Google's stated content policy: http://www.blogger.com/content.g

An anti-Obama site -- assuming that it is not also a spam site, as Google's warning letters seem to claim -- would not violate any of this policy.

Also, Google's Terms of Service document states: Much of the content of Blogger.com and Blogspot.com -- including the contents of specific postings -- is provided by and is the responsibility of the person or people who made such postings. Google does not monitor the content of Blogger.com and Blogspot.com, and takes no responsibility for such content. Instead, Google merely provides access to such content as a service to you.

There is a plethora of anti-Obama sites still on Blogger/Blogspot:

http://typicalpawhitewoman.blogspot.com/

http://americanpowerblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/nobama-democratic-unity-may-prove.html

http://obamawtf.blogspot.com

http://rezkowatch.blogspot.com

http://nobamanews.blogspot.com

http://123beta.blogspot.com/2008/06/nobama.html

http://massroots.blogspot.com/2008/06/nobama.html

http://philosofix.blogspot.com/2008/06/nobama.html

http://annienyc.blogspot.com/2008/06/why-nobama.html

That's just a few of them. There are TONS more. Google has an awful loooooooooong way to go if they are actually trying to censor all anti-Obama Blogger and Blogspot sites.

[MissouriConservative]

” Youtube has the same fascist policy toward anyone who disagrees with Obama.”

Google owns Youtube.

[RepublitarianRoger2]

Youtube has the same fascist policy toward anyone who disagrees with Obama.

Just try launching a video that is against Obama, and see how quickly it is pulled from the site.

I've seen no evidence of this. It might happen sometimes, but I've seen no evidence of it. Just go to Youtube and search for "Nobama", or "Obama Elitist" or "Obama Wright" or "Obama Rezko" or "Obama Scumbag" for that matter. You'll find plenty.

[sionnsar]

First Amendment? What First Amendment?

The First Amendment that protects nude dancing but prohibits political speech 30 (60?) days before an election.

[Prole]

On Youtube, "The Friendly Geek" is a Japanese student who personally created over 100 films about his opposition to Barack Obama's deception, communism, racism and narcissism.

"Friendly" also regularly questioned why Obama would associate himself with horrible people like Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, and was never racist in his presentations.

The Obama people hated him so much, that they made counter videos depicting him as a "racist."

His account was eventually terminated because of all the Obama people hitting the "Report Abuse" button.

While he is but one example, he was one of the strongest voices of opposition that Obama's camp faced on You Tube, and the fascists terminated his account entirely.

Youtube reports that his account was "suspended," but that is a load of malarchy given that it's been suspended for nearly 2 months now.

I doubt his account will ever be re-activated, but here is his story if you care to hear it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAlPjQ7YG4o

[RonDog]

From their NEW address, at NObamablog.wordpress.com/about:

About NObama

Welcome to NObama - Not Now, Not Ever

We started on Blogger in April 2008. We accumulated a database of information on Barack Obama - 268 posts worth, until the night of June 25 when an email was sent to let us know that Blogger was locking us out from making new blog entries due to their policy against “spamming.”

Interestingly, we learned that many other anti-Obama Blogger blogs were “coincidentally” locked down within the last few days for suspicious reasons.

We were told we would have to wait while Blogger puts the blog under “review” which could take up to 4 business days.

The campaign won’t wait; so here we are. As of this writing, there are only 131 days to expose Barack Obama until we go to the polls on Election Day. We’re still working on getting the place set up the way we like it, but we’re almost there!

Thanks to all who supported in so many ways during the transition from there to here.

We hope our readers will find us here (we dropped breadcrumbs!)

Let’s get back to work!

[RepublitarianRoger2]

I’m not a rah-rah person for Google / Youtube. I’ve heard stories such as yours and I’m sure it happens. I simply pointed to evidence that there is a huge number of anti-Obama videos and blog sites still out there.

It’s usually fairly easy to reinstate an account that has been suspended in this manner. I’m surprised this guy’s has been out for 2 months.

I suspect that Obama’s supporters are more to blame for this than anyone else. They hit Report Abuse and reported it as a copyright violation. Since his videos DID include copyrighted material, well there’s YouTube’s “out.” They are obviously very lax about copyrighted stuff on the site, and only act if enough people report abuse. Looks like enough people did.

[RepublitarianRoger2]

I can’t say why that one was shut down while a large number of other Nobama sites remain up on Blogger. Interesting, if nothing else, but I don’t have enough of the full story to claim that it was deliberately shut down as an act of censorship. Not saying it wasn’t censorship, just that I can’t say for certain. I was just objectively pointing out that there are tons of “nobama” sites still out there, hosted by Google’s blog services.

[Prole]

One of his videos used a song from Depeche Mode.

It was a re-mix of Jeremiah Wright's numerous blasphemous speeches while "Personal Jesus" was playing in the background.

This one is also pretty good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yixPgq1Mh2A&feature=related

[rawhide]

Maybe we need a ‘Fairness Doctrine’ applying to Internet Search Engines? How about it Poloski? /s