Monday, June 30, 2008

Did Obamabots target my blog?

Starting Sunday, every time I tried to create a post, the Blogspot software asked me for word verification. I figured it was some new thing Blogspot was doing, but then I checked and saw this message:
Your blog requires word verification
Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. ... Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.
Hmmm. And then I saw this:
After some digging it became apparent that several Blogspot accounts had been shut down because of similar spam issues, and nearly all of them had three things in common: Most were pro-Hillary Clinton blogs, all were anti-Barack Obama, and several were listed on justsaynodeal.com, an anti-Obama website.
A "Flag Blog" link sits at the very top of every free Blogspot account. If a person finds objectionable content on a Blogspot site or suspects it's publishing spam, he or she can click on the link and it will send a notice to Google requesting "human review."
I spoke to several of the bloggers who had accounts locked and every single one was convinced that it was Obama supporters who had flagged the blogs in some kind of concerted effort to silence them.
If this is what explains The Other McCain's being flagged as a "spam blog," I'm going to be extremely angry. In point of fact, as "anti-Obama" as I might be, I'm also pretty doggone "anti-McCain," too. Every conservative site on Blogspot could perhaps be construed as "anti-Obama," and thus shut down by such online vandalism. As Ed Morrisey says:
I seriously doubt that the Obama campaign would be stupid enough to get involved in such an effort, but it does say something about his supporters.
Is this how the idealistic acolytes of Hope would show their support of "a new direction in politics"? By resorting to brownshirt goon squad tactics?

I've sent a message to Blogspot requesting an explanation of this. In the meantime, every time I have to type in that stupid word verification in order to post an update, I'll just mutter to myself: "Fascist Obama scumbags." Call that "objectionable content," if you will.
UPDATE: New York Times has an item on the situation, but without a link to yours truly. And I'm still having to type in the stupid word verification, you facist Obama scumbags.

3 comments:

  1. I had that happen to me a long time ago ... they sent me a email saying that their software picked up I was spamming and I had to do what you're doing ... I answered them back and they looked at my blog and fixed the spamming flag.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It could be worse. Google could have delisted you from Google search, as they have PrestoPundit.

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  3. It's not a conspiracy, despite the knee jerk reaction of certain individuals.

    This happened to a lot of blogs, regardless of subject matter, due to a software bug. Check out the official statement: http://buzz.blogger.com/2008/08/you-are-not-spam.html

    ReplyDelete