Questions Arise as Anti-Obama Blogs Get the Boot From Google
Barack Obama’s support online is the stuff of legend, and most of it is positive. His netroots fundraising efforts have resulted in his campaign being the richest in history, and the mature realization of the Howard Dean phenomenon. His Internet advertising far outpaces his rivals, and he is the favorite amongst much of the Internet upper-crust. His site’s social network does a fantastic job of keeping his supporters connected and his campaigns overall grasp of the technology available far outpaces his rival, John McCain.
However, rumors are swirling that some of his supporters may be abusing their technological advantage. Several anti-Obama blogs, many of them by Hillary Clinton supporters, have been shut down on Google’s Blogger network after being identified as spam.
But there is no concrete evidence of foul play, and Google’s explanation for the shutdown scotches speculation by the conspiracy theorists.
Though there is nothing yet pointing to manipulation by Obama supporters, these blogs aren’t specifically spam–that much is certain. And where there’s smoke, there’s fire. So how has it come to pass that legitimate anti-Obama sites have been shut down?
NewsBusters, a conservative site, believes that Obama supporters are using Blogger’s anti-spam function to incorrectly flag the banned blogs as spam in an effort to get them taken down. As of yet there is no substantive evidence of this, and it may well be an attempt by anti-Obama forces to make him and his supporters look bad. It’s entirely possible the blog owners and supporters may have themselves forced the blogs down in a clever move.
Google has responded, saying that mass emails sent out by the “Just Say No Deal” coalition triggered Gmail to mark the blogs as spam.
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.
Perhaps a case of a rush to judgment by anti-Obama forces? There is a lot of suspicion that Google is blatantly pro-Obama, and it appears as though the folks at NewsBusters are choosing to believe that Google is out to get anybody against Obama. As of yet, however, there is no evidence that this is the case, but don’t be surprised to see more of this speculation arise.
Story via Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land
Technorati Tags: barack obama, google, blogger, just say no deal
