I came home from taking my father to the pool this afternoon and thought I’d see if there were any comments that I needed to approve before watering the tomatoes and starting dinner, when this urgent message changed my plans:
Look what’s happened to the Just a Girl in Short Shorts blog:
http://girlinshortshorts.blogspot.com
It’s not a content warning. You can’t get to the blog anymore. Based on the taglines I see here – http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/beckyshorts/ – she believes complaints were made by conservatives. No way. This is the work of Obama’s people. They did it to Hillary last year. I think this may have been her fatal post:
Becky, the author of the Blogger blog Just a Girl in Short Shorts Talking About Whatever, is a lesbian, mother, lawyer and libertarian. She always has something worthwhile to say. Her illustrations are occasionally on the frisky side, but within the Rule 5 standards set out by dear Stacy McCain of The Other McCain, who provides advice on his blog on How to Get a Million Hits in Less Than a Year.
Come to find that Becky had no problems with censorship during the evil Boooosh regime — the harassment didn’t start until Obama became president:
This blog chugged along for two and a half years without any problems, but with the Dawn of the Age of Obama—nothing but trouble. The blog has never changed, and it certainly has not changed since May—the last time this happened, and Google, after an avalanche of complaints from my readers, decided that I am not really a purveyor of smut and removed the content warning splash page.
Please go there and offer her words of encouragement and support. Do not be deterred by the Google content warning page.
Update, 7/16/2009:
Here is the first of comments posted at Becky’s site from a Blogger representative:
Becky – I’m a product manager on Blogger, and would hate to see you stop blogging (here or anywhere).
I sent you an e-mail (to the yahoo.com address on your profile) back in May the last time this happened, and sent another tonight – I want to do what I can to make this right (starting with clearing the air about why the interstitial appeared today) and hope that we can keep you as an active blogger.
To be clear: at no time are any classifications applied to blogs because of their political views. That would be the antithesis of why Blogger was founded ten years ago, and is contrary to everything the team believes about giving our users a platform on which they can speak their mind.
I’m traveling today and tomorrow but hope that we get a chance to connect.
Rick Klau
Product Manager, Blogger
rklau@google.com
The second one is especially interesting because he explains why so many Hillary blogs disappeared during the campaign season — although Obama blogs did not, go figure:
@I R A Darth Aggie – last year’s issue with the Hillary blogs that were blocked was absolutely not politically motivated. There were a number of theories about the root cause, none of which were actually correct.
The actual explanation is far less exciting: one of the many signals used to inform our spam algorithm (not from Blogger, but from another internal system) had a bug introduced. That bug resulted in a batch of URLs getting added to a probable spam signal. This wasn’t exclusive to blogs that talked about Hillary – there were a number of non-political blogs as well – but because it was during the election and they were the most visibly affected blogs, that became the obvious (albeit wrong) conclusion.
It was not in any way influenced by end users attempting to game the system.
I don’t know that we’ve ever talked about that specific situation before (it happened before I joined Blogger, but was one of the issues I raised during my interviews internally – I was concerned there might be some truth to the rumors), so I’m not surprised to see this info persist. But I thought I’d just try and clarify that background.
–Rick
8:14 AM
