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Google Shuts Down Anti-Obama Sites on its Blogger Platform

June 29, 2008 by 11 Comments

-By Warner Todd Huston

**UPDATE** BELOW FOLD

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!?

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00Publius Contributor - Democrats/Leftists - Google - Inernet - Media Bias - News - Security/Safety - Society/Culture - Technology - UN - Warner Todd Huston

Google De-Lists Prominent UN Critic Blogger

February 19, 2008 by

-By Warner Todd Huston

In another blow against freedom of speech on the Internet, Fox News is reporting that Google has taken the measure of de-listing the work of an anti-UN blogger named Matthew Lee. For several years, Lee has run the Inner City Press, a small news/opinion site that is focused on criticizing the United Nations. But since Google has teamed up with the UN on recent initiatives, Google has found that Lee’s criticism is too much for them to handle.

Mr. Lee has been taking after big targets for a long time, so he is no newcomer to the scene. In 1987 he went after Citigroup with his corruption exposes, but since 2005 the United Nations has been his favorite target. He has especially focused on the “inner workings of what could be called the practical-applications arm of the international organization, the United Nations Development Programme.”

As Fox News reports:

Many of Lee’s stories were featured prominently whenever Web users looked for news about the U.N. using the powerful Google News search engine, a vital way for media outlets both large and small to get their articles read… But beginning Feb. 13, Google News users could no longer find new stories from the Inner City Press.

After the Government Accountability Project discovered the plight of Inner City Press and raised their own stink about the de-listing, Google claimed that the de-listing was a mistake but that it would take “a couple weeks” to fix the “glitch.”

“We acknowledged our misunderstanding … but it takes time for the restoration to occur,” [Google spokesman Gabriel] Stricker said. “The glitch will be resolved as soon as possible. We’re working on it.”

The GAP, however is none too happy about Google’s “glitch.” GAP’s international-program director Bea Edwards told Fox that Inner City Press was “the most effective and important media organization for UN whistleblowers.”

“We’re alarmed. The question is, is what user sent the complaint? And it’s probably not too hard to guess. We would guess the complaints came from the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme).”

This isn’t something new for Internet organizations like Google, however. Google and other Internet organizations like Newsvine and Digg have been embroiled in efforts to eliminate the conservative voice from the Internet for quite some time.

For instance, Newsvine recently canceled the account of the conservative news/opinion site called The New Media Alliance. And, as Noel Sheppard reported back in May of 2006, the conservative opinion site called The New Media Journal was removed from search engines by Google because Google deemed the commentary site a “hate site.”

So, far from being the wild west of opinion, the Internet is seemingly more and more in the grip of leftist organizations that are out to eliminate conservative expression on the net. Add to this the liberals in Congress who want to reinstate the inaptly named “Fairness Doctrine,” and we get ominous signs of the left’s oppressive ideas of “freedom of speech.”

It’s just one more example that Jonah Goldberg is right. Liberals are closer to fascists than any conservative.

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