Krehbiel Commentary

There's been some consternation lately about Google allegedly "shutting down" some blogs that were critical of Barack HUSSEIN! Obama.

Prepare to be disappointed, but it's not a conspiracy by our Google overlords.  These bloggers are simply running into the dark side of the Web 2.0-style self-regulating community (which is what any "flag this site" or "rate this post" system is).  This is why I've always been skeptical of the Web 2.0 community philosophy -- it's basically mob rule with zero protection for minorities.  We all know it's relatively easy to whip up a frenzy and build a mob to torch some poor unsuspecting community member... humanity loves the circular firing squad.  It's now even easier in the digital age, because the mob could actually be a single technically saavy person with a grudge.  That's undoubtedly what's happening with the Blogger shutdowns -- some guy or guys gaming the system to harass some blogs he doesn't like.  It's an annoying but commonplace occurrance in the world of Web 2.0 -- it's like some punk egging your house.

But alas, in the continuing effort to divide America, everything must be leveraged into an us-or-them issue when there's an election coming up, so here we go with the conspiracy theories.  It's not a kid egging your house, it's the egg manufacturers infringing on your rights!  Yeah, that's it!  That could work!  Google and the dirty, dirty libs are trampling our First Amendment rights and censoring our free speech!

Side note:  You may notice a certain disdain in my tone.  It's hard to be sympathetic toward bloggers complaining about their completely free blog platform disappearing.  It's a bit like complaining when the government stops giving you food stamps.

I didn't pay any attention at first.  After all, these people probably have no experience setting up and administering a massive network of hardware and software like the one supporting Blogger, so it's understandable that they might reach the wrong conclusions.  But now these people are starting to sound like 9-11 Truthers.  These Google Truthers are convinced that the Obama campaign and the dirty, dirty libs are shutting down their blogs to silence them and a massive attack on their civil liberties is underway.

Well, okay they probably don't really believe all that.  It's just politically expedient to say they believe it so they can deceive some unsuspecting voters out there.  J.R. of Bearing Drift, who usually stays on the rational side of the fence, recently picked up the censorship meme and wrote:

First, on Blogger, certain Republican blogs, including Virginia’s own SWAC Girl and Contemporary Conservative were identified as “Spam Blogs” by Obama supporters to Google. This caused the algorithm to automatically shut these blogs down for a period of time before Google finally realized what was going on and corrected the problem. (emphasis mine)

Golly, that evil free-speech-squashing algorithm must have shut down those blogs for weeks or months or even years!  That's an outrageous violation of the First Amendment!  Those dirty, dirty libs have gone too far!  Hey wait, he didn't actually say how long they were down.  I wonder why he wasn't more clear on that point?