Friday, November 25, 2011

Guess I'd better not quote Revelation on this Blogger blog

Ignore the fact for a moment that Google, the company that hosts this blog, does business in multiple countries. Pretend for the moment that Google just did business in the United States. In such a situation, Google doesn't necessarily have to listen to EU water-hating bureaucrats or Chinese firewallers - Google only has to listen to American legislators.

That in itself is a lot to listen to, inasmuch as Senator Joe Lieberman is apparently reviewing Blogger's Terms of Service, according to Talking Points Memo. This publication "obtained" a letter that Senator Lieberman wrote to Google's Larry Page on November 22. After discussing what Jose Pimentel used the Blogger/Google servers to do, Lieberman then noted:

Blogger’s Content Policy does not expressly ban terrorist content nor does it provide a ‘flag’ feature for such content.

Apparently Senator Lieberman is not aware how Google works - or doesn't work. I can just picture what would happen if Blogger had a "terrorist" flag. Some Glenn Beck supporter would flag an Obama supporter's blog for advocating Kenyan rule of the United States, and the Obama supporter would then flag the Beck supporter's blog for advocating the mass annihilation of poor people.

And what would happen? If Blogger's flagging policies were anything like YouTube's, the blog would be "permanently disabled," and you wouldn't be able to talk to anyone about it.

Now perhaps Lieberman is (understandably) sensitive about this issue because of the Dmitry Dyatlov affair - incidentally, I have no idea whether Dyatlov used Blogger to post his suggestion that Lieberman was "one Jew, who we absolutely must shoot in the face (many times)."

But in the Dyatlov case, you didn't need Wikipedia-editor types to alert the populace - one of Dyatlov's co-workers alerted the police.

And what is a terrorist post? Is it any post that could fall under the definition of treason? In that case, am I a terrorist if I publish a link to Revelation 19:14-15?

On a more serious note, this blog and every other Blogger blog includes the capability to report terms of service violations, including "Hate or violence" posts. So it appears that Senator Lieberman's concern is already covered.
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