It looks like it was a concerted effort on the part of Obama partisans to take anti-Obama bloggers offline by maliciously flagging them to Google as spam sites. NY Sun:
I was not part of this network either, yet my site was blocked for two days. I drew"These tech-savvy smart alecks have figured out that if you report a blog you don't like, you can do some damage to a person," Mr. Langbert said.
A spokesman for Google, Adam Kovacevich, said in a statement that an overzealous antispam filter was responsible for the blocks.
"We believe this was 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," he said. "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."
Several of the blogs that were blocked, including hillaryorbust.com and comealongway.blogspot.com, are part of the "Just Say No Deal" network of anti-Obama blogs. But Mr. Langbert's blog is not, leading him to conclude that Obama supporters had targeted him.
some attention from Obamanoids recently, and went after him Thursday on Ludacris, the day my site was blocked. I think there should be review and email to the affected blogger first:
Some writers have had their blogs unblocked, while others have moved them to WordPress, a rival blog host.
"I don't think" Google has "malicious intentions at all, it's just that spammers can literally overrun a service if you're not careful, so their defenses have become overzealous," a spokesman for WordPress, Matthew Mullenweg, said in an e-mail.
"We always have human review before turning off an active blog," he said. "People invest so much time into their blogs, to treat it with anything less than the utmost respect is criminal."
Yes. I'm staying put for now, as I blog at other sites, but this is a real black mark against Google. And these Obama partisans apparently can't stand free debate.
--crossposted at BackyardConservative
Posted by Anne Leary on August 5, 2008 11:01 AM
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