Google Blogoscoped

Monday, February 26, 2007

The Content Warning for Google-hosted Blogs

When a Google Blogger blog is flagged by many users, and Google reviews it deciding it contains hate content, then Google may put up a “content warning” (this is not a new feature, it exists for some time). What happens is that you won’t see the blog’s content when you enter its address, but a page reading the following (case adjusted):

Content Warning

Some readers of this blog have contacted Google because they believe this blog’s content is hateful. In general, Google does not review nor do we endorse the content of this or any blog. For more information about this message, please consult our FAQ

[I Do Not Wish to Continue] [I Understand and Wish to Continue]

If you hit the “I do not wish” button you’ll be sent to the Blogger homepage. Click the “I understand” button and you’ll be forwarded to the content of the blog in question. Google in their FAQ entry on flagging blogs explains:

The Flag button is not censorship and it cannot be manipulated by angry mobs. Political dissent? Incendiary opinions? Just plain crazy? Bring it on. (...)

Special Case for Hate Speech

When the community has voted and hate speech is identified on Blog*Spot, Google may exercise its right to place a Content Warning page in front of the blog and set it to “unlisted.”

An unlisted blog won’t appear in listings of Blogspot updates shown on Blogger. However, it still shows up in Google’s web search. To locate such hate blogs, you can search for:

“Some readers of this blog have contacted Google because they believe this blog’s content is hateful” site:blogspot.com

There are 211 results for this search in Google right now but that is not the number of “warned” blogs, as not every hit will actually point to a blog frontpage with a warning. But some of the blogs which were or are actively filtered alleged hate sites are listed below (my analysis of what people may have objected to is only brief, and not meant as any form of conclusive statement on the issue; e.g. a deeper analysis may or may not conclude that a blog was actually a parody of hatred, or that a blog was actually balanced criticism):

[Thanks Manoj Nahar!]

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