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Saturday, August 20, 2005
Flag this!
 Apparently Blogger has implemented a new tool in the fight against free expression. You can now "flag" a blog as "politically incorrect, potential [sic] hurtful, or just plain gross." Go check your blog*spot blog - it's been there for about three days now.
According to Blogger's explanation of the process, pages with enough flags will be reviewed by an actual living, breathing, Google employee before being recommended for either delisting, the placement of a disclaimer, or outright deletion. Human oversight might be a load off my mind (my first worry was that, if run using nothing more than a mathematical algorithm much like what Google uses to rate news sources, groups could get together and "freep" blogs they don't care for, or perhaps their friends' blogs as a practical joke), if not for Google's track record on identifying online "hate speech."
No, I don't like this one bit. But that's what you get when you blog on someone else's dime.
(Don't take this to mean that I'm worried for my own blog, or that there's going to be some kind of "Kristallnacht" against blogs of a certain political persuasion. What this comes down to is that any censorship of "objectionable material" is a perversion of what is (was?) a haven for the free expression of ideas and opinions. And I shouldn't need to point out that all material is "objectionable" to the people who disagree with it.)
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