Free Exchange of Ideas, Spam, and Unintended Consequences

Don't worry - the Lemming isn't going political.

This post is about the free exchange of ideas (I'm for it), and what was either a well-intentioned anti-spam process gone wrong - or people using an anti-spam reporting feature to silence critics.

Over a half-dozen blogs, all with the same point of view, were frozen by their host last month. At almost exactly the same time. Keeping them from covering an important event.

Quite a coincidence.

From what I've seen, there's no way of knowing exactly what happened, but I think that somebody found a way to make a system do what they wanted. It's the timing and the focused results: flip a coin once and get 'heads,' that's chance; flip a coin seven times and get 'heads' each time, there's something special about you, or the coin.

In the news:

• "Anti-Obama Bloggers Question Why Google Froze Their Accounts"
  FOXNews (July 15, 2008)
  • "Some bloggers opposed to Barack Obama say they suspect Obama's supporters — with the assistance of Google — may have tried to censor them when the Internet giant froze their Web sites for five days last month.
  • "Seven blogs run by Democrats who oppose Obama's nomination for the presidency were incorrectly flagged as spam sites by Blogger, the hosting service Google has owned since 2003. Google says it was an automated response from a spam filter.
  • "But the bloggers believe that Web surfers who support Obama took advantage of a loophole in Blogger's system that allows readers to report spam blogs, the artificial Web sites that abound on the Internet and are used to promote other sites.
  • " 'It appears that [Blogger's] policy can be manipulated by people determined to shut down the free exchange of ideas,' said Carissa Snedeker, whose blog, BlueLyon, was among those that were frozen....
  • " '...We believe this may have been caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the "Just Say No Deal" network of [anti-Obama] blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam,' Google wrote, referring to a coalition of disaffected Democrats who oppose Obama's candidacy.
  • "Blogger quarantined the seven anti-Obama blogs on June 25 while it conducted a review, a process that took five days and made it impossible for the bloggers to write posts on the weekend of a joint event held by Obama and Hillary Clinton....
• "Blocked anti-Obama blogs spur Google probe"
  Washington Times (July 7, 2008)
  • "Does Google Inc. violate the same 'neutrality' principles that it wants mandated for Internet providers like Comcast Corp.?
  • "That's the argument being made by some who accuse the search behemoth of hypocrisy when it comes to free speech on the Internet.
  • "Here's the deal: Mountain View, Calif.-based Google recently drew the ire of several authors of anti-Obama blogs, hosted on the company's Blogger platform, whose posting rights were temporarily suspended after Google identified as them 'potential spam blogs.'
  • " '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,' Google said in an e-mail to the owner of Come a Long Way, one of at least seven blogs that were shut down. The affected blogs are all opposed to the campaign of Sen. Barack Obama, Illinois Democrat, and have a common association with the anti-Obama Web site JustSayNoDeal.com...."

What next? I hope that blog hosts in general, and Blogger in particular, take a look at how they're dealing with spam and user reports. This sort of lockdown doesn't make anybody look good, except maybe the people whose blogs were temporarily frozen.