2008 Election CoverUps

GOOGLE SHUTS DOWN ANTI-OBAMA SITES

July 2008

By Andrew Peterson
For CoverUps.com

Troubling reports from Pamela Geller's Atlas Shrugs blog and Mitchell Langberts detail shut-downs of their web sites by internet search giant Google. The shut downs seem to coincide with publication of anti-Obama posts on both sites. Anonymous complaints that the sites were sources of spam preceded the shutdowns.

Atlas Shrugs was shut down after publishing a petition on the Barack Obama birth certificate controversy. Geller writes:

Following my posting of the Obama birth certificate petition that Contrarimaiiri posted, Google/Blogspot has Locked Me out of my Blog. This occurred sometime today. They sent me a message that the Blog was reported as a spam blog, and they are preventing postings pending their review of my blog.

Langberts' blog was suspended when traffic to his site increased after he posted anti-Obama material. Langberts writes:

Dear Friends:
I have been using blogspot for about a year and enjoy it very much. I am a professor of business at Brooklyn College and include notes from my academic reading as well as political blogs that are somewhat controversial on my blog, www.mitchell-langbert.com. I have had over 7,100 individual views since March 23, 08. I happen to be a Republican and favor John McCain for president. I have blogged some anti-Obama blogs, nothing that ought to be problematic from a offensive content or similar kind of concern. However, somehow, right after I got an increase in traffic from some blogs I did on the Obama campaign, my access to the blog was blocked due to an allegation, which was of course false, that my blog is a "spam" blog.

Our Take

While we are not necessarily of the opinion that this is Big Brother in action, it bears watching. While Google has a legitimate interest in punishing spammers, it is well known that their management is actively supportive of Obama (which of course they have every right to be). Given the enormous and growing power they have, accusations like those from Lambert and Geller deserve serious attention.

It's easy to imagine that the combination of the tech-savvy partisanship of the Obama camp and the political preferences of Google's management could lead to at least an unconscious presumption of guilt in the event of spamming charges made against bloggers with conservative (or Obama-unfriendly) opinions.

Here are some questions that could help clear things up:

• Have any pro-Obama bloggers been shut down, for any reason?

• If so, how many bloggers have been shut down, and for how long?

• Among conservative (or pro-Hillary) bloggers, how long did it take Google to clear them? Did they meet their self-imposed 48-hour deadline?

If it turns out that a disproportionate number of the shut-down blogs were either conservative or otherwise opposed to Obama or that the complaints took too long to resolve, then Google has some explaining to do – perhaps in a courtroom.

Read the original blog post on Atlas Shrugs.