All aboard the Hyperbole Express
Since I published my article about the Anti-Obama blog outages last night the story has exploded across the blogosphere. I probably should have expected this, but I was surprised to find that within hours Blogspot users were announcing boycotts. All kinds of conspiracy theories were launched. Bloggers were using the incident to attack Obama, Google, or both. Free speech was under attack. Nazi comparisons were made. And I think an LOLcat or two weighed in.
C’mon people, get a grip. If you read the article in full you’ll see I expressed a good deal of skepticism as to whether foul play from Obama supporters was the cause of all this.
I tried to contact Google for my article; no response. But I spoke to New York Times writer Miguel Helft today and he did manage to get a response from the search giant, which he published in this article:
On Monday, Google would not explicitly rebut the idea that it had been tricked but said that the cause of the temporary blockage appeared to be elsewhere. “It appears that our anti-spam filters caused some Blogger accounts to be blocked from creating new posts,” Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich said in a statement. “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.”
Also, at least one of the affected bloggers got this email today from Google:
Hi there,
On behalf of the Blogger Team, I want to apologize for the recent trouble you’ve had with your locked blog. Automated spam detection is not yet a perfect science, and although we are constantly working to improve our tools, it appears that our filters have caused some Blogger accounts to mistakenly 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. Regardless, we have restored posting rights to your blog, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression.
So once again, we apologize for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience as we looked into the problem.
Sincerely,
The Blogger Team
Their explanation is certainly interesting, and if true it means that Obama supporters had absolutely nothing to do with the Blogspot lockdowns.
I bet a few anti-Obama folks who thought they had discovered Hitler 2.0. might be feeling a little silly right now. Of course Miguel told me that Google wasn’t really elaborating much on this issue, and their claims sound a little suspicious, but wouldn’t it be ironic if they were telling the truth and the blogs were flagged simply because of the mass emailing?
Come on Simon!
“said that the cause of the temporary blockage appeared to be elsewhere”
we have no proof of that! that’s them covering their asses. Look believe it or not, but I’m telling you I knew immediately it was obambi’s thugs when I discovered my blog down on the 21st.
I visit many blogs of many kinds, I didn’t see any other (type) of blog down. I’ve used blogger a very long time. Then days later MANY anti obambi sites were hit??? come on!
ASide from that here’s my reason why I know who/how it happened.
Keep your friends close and keep your enemies closer. I may not post on obambi blogs but I sure as hell read their comments sections, have for months and I read lots and lots of comments. FOR MONTHS. It was only in the last 2 wks that i’ve started reading and watching them discuss tactics to shut us down and knock us out.
let’s not forget it was quite recently that obama setup shop online to fight the (so called) conspiracies. I’ve read too many plans from obamabots and comments about getting us off our free blogs.
I’m telling you the truth here! They were conspiring more and more on tactics to shut us down and then low and behold, look what happened.
Blogger and google I assume being free have no lawsuit to worry about but they do have to save face here don’t they? They’ll say it was a wide spread problem.
I’d like them to prove that to me. show me 100,000 sites completely off topic that went down in the last 10 days then I’ll believe it…
either way, they need to fix this ridiculous setup.
Simon:
First, thank you for writing the initial article that brought this story to light and I do think that the reporting by you was pretty fair.
While Google may have a technical explanation for the fiasco, they “would not explicitly rebut the idea that it had been tricked”. They also do not defend nor explain their policy of blocking bloggers before investigating. I hope this is something that they will reconsider in light of this event.
Finally, the apology that the blogger, McCain Democrats, received is the exact same e-mail I receive and in fact it was was even addressed to me, not to McCain Democrats. 2 other bloggers received the same e-mail addressed to me. See details at http://comealongway.blogspot.com/
I am not sure what this means, but I do think that your article and others like it brought the issue to Googles’ attention– they unblocked our blogs and sent the same e-mail to all the Just Say No Deal coalition members who were affected.
Now, I think that it would be paranoia to think that Google is diverting e-mails addressed to my Gmail account in retaliation (as suggested by sending e-mail addressed to me to other bloggers) or, that they are reading my e-mails, so I won’t dwell on that possibility.
Geeklove,
You are damn lucky you received a response of apology from them. I apparently am one of the few who stayed on blogger and I’ve never received an apology or back up email from them.
I stay there and my blog is actually broken and has been for about 2 months. Unable to set it to (use) comments and it won’t let me set it to only add partial posts (with the header) on the first page- it seems broken to the point it ignores commands on how I want the blog set.
I know I’m not the only one with this problem. I’ve seen others post for help on these same topics in the help forum and I’ve yet to see a real fix or answer- Also I’ve spent the last 2 months digging thru their help section trying to find a way to actually contact a human being regarding these problems….. to no avail unfortunately.
So consider yourself fortunate you even got a reply/apology from them!
here I sit with a broken blog, STAYING with blogger and not moving to wordpress, and I’ve never received any such correspondence to apology for shutting me down.
I’m jealous!
oh and I do have to add this:
you stated- “they unblocked our blogs and sent the same e-mail to all the Just Say No Deal coalition members who were affected. ”
I am a Just Say No Deal member, was affected and received no such response from blogger/google as you stated.