Monday, December 1, 2008

Internet Political Censorship Woes


It came as little surprise the other day when I read the article by Chelsea Schilling featured on World Net Daily regarding the censorship by Google of the conservative blog Atlas Shrugs for anti-Obama articles according to it's publisher, Pamela Geller. Daily hits to the website have dropped from as high as 45,000 per day to less than a hundred after Geller featured a story about a certified forensic expert claiming the Barack Obama Certification of Live Birth posted on Daily Kos and other sites a forgery and an obvious fake. Why would that comes as any surprise as Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, prepares to leave the internet giant to assume a position in the Obama cabinet?

I've noticed this political censorship occurring on a much smaller scale during the last several months. I noticed as far back as September that articles I posted that were not favorable toward Obama appeared quickly in top 10 searches but several days later completely disappeared, but yet when I wrote an article during the same time frame about a 1972 Harley shovelhead formerly owned by David Lee Roth of Van Halen fame, the article still appears high on search lists. Many articles that I wrote painting either John McCain or Sarah Palin in a positive light never appeared in the search engines at all.

I've also noticed similar occurrences on sites owned by Google such as YouTube and Blogger. Videos on YouTube that even hinted about Obama's Muslim heritage often disappeared after only a few views. As late as this date, when clicking on Leo Donofrio's blog, Natural Born Citizen, one receives the following warning: "Possible Blogger Terms of Service Violations". I searched the site rather carefully and could find nothing offensive or in violation of Bloggers' Terms of Service.

Almost comedically, Google's partisanship shines through when searching the word "idiot", a YouTube video declaring, "Is Bush an idiot?" displays at number 4 and when searching the word "messiah", "Is Barack Obama the Messiah?" rings in at number four on the list. We all realize that the Google censorship team consists of a group of 20-something geeks in cubicles but please try to be a little more center of left. I always thought that liberals despised censorship.

Google, you've done a great job throughout your short but highly successful history so don't let politics become the monkey on your back. Please keep the censors busy scrubbing kiddy porn while the internet remains a free applicable place for debate on American politics.

2 comments:

TejasKat said...

Hi John!

I have posted elsewhere about MY dealings with GOOGLE their TOOLBAR & their SEARCH ENGINE HISTORY.

After noticing a few days ago that there was an icon telling me HOW MANY SITE VISITS I'd made -- I went back to the Search Results from those days to see what they were saying about those site visits.

I saw that they had kept track of the number of times I'd gone to Leo Donofrio's Blog -- Natural Born Citizen. That pi$$ed me off!!!

I double checked to be sure the boxes were UNchecked to send them URL info -- then, I tried about 5 times to uninstall the toolbar. I uninstalled from their "uninstall" feature, then from the Control Panel. I had to reboot -- and the damn thing was STILL there! I followed their link to troubleshooting uninstall -- and found I needed to go HUNT for a certain file folder: 3112ca9c-de6d-4884-a869-9855de68056c.

I let them have it with BOTH BARRELS! bam!@!!! bam!@@!!!!!

I just went back to my search history & the number of site visits icon is gone. It must have had to do with the monitoring on the Google Search Engine -- even though I had unchecked that item.

It felt great to cuss them out!!! ha!~

By-the-way -- we ALL know Blogger is owned by GOOGLE...

Also, you can get to Leo's site, just click the arrow that is on the Terms of Service Violations page. That worked for me. Don't know WHY they blocked him. This Obama-censorship is getting scary -- it's getting more like China-censorship.

Ted said...

"Dirty Pool" at the Supreme Court apparently on behalf of Obama currently usurping YOUR Constitution: Leo Donofrio's companion case, brought by Cort Wrotnowski, with fuller/better briefing showing Obama is not an Article II "natural born citizen" reportedly has been sidetracked to the anthrax lab to deprive the full Court from seeing those filings in connection with Donofrio's case this Friday, Dec 5, 2008. DO SOMETHING AMERICA!!!