Update on the blocking of Mangan’s Miscellany

Dennis Mangan sent this note earlier today:

Thanks for writing about my blog. At this point I don’t know what’s happening, other than that when I try to log on to my Blogger account, I get this:

Account temporarily disabled We apologize for the inconvenience. Accounts may be disabled because of a perceived violation of either the Google Terms of Service or product-specific Terms of Service.

As a correspondent of mine said, this is all very Orwellian: they don’t give you notice that your blog will be deleted, and they don’t tell you why, other than the vague “terms of service” thing, seemingly a catch-all that lets them do whatever they want. It’s been pointed out elsewhere that other blogs hosted by Google are far “worse” than mine, but I think the deal is that they let you alone unless someone complains, so my guess is that’s what happened. I’ve written a few things about Climategate lately, and it’s been noted (e.g. by James Delingpole of The Telegraph) that Google is trying to censor search results for that topic. Others have suggested that it was because I wrote about Muslims and that maybe a Muslim complained; complaints by members of victim groups are presumably taken seriously. Another suggested the topic of marijuana was the problem. I wrote a fair amount lately on Peter Duesberg, HIV skepticism, and the attempt by the group AIDSTruth to shut down the journal Medical Hypotheses, which is edited by my friend Bruce Charlton. Since they are known to advocate censorship, if I had to guess that would be it.

LA writes:

That Blogger not only blocked (or even deleted) Mangan’s blog, but did so without giving him any notice or any party to contact to find out what is the problem, is beyond outrageous. And the idea that they would do this to a blog on the basis of a single complaint shows a totalitarian mentality.

If this is the way Blogger, which is part of Google, treats a blog that uses its service, then right-wing bloggers are not safe using Blogger and operating within the Blogger domain. They need to look for a different platform such as MovableType with which they can set up their own blog at a hosting service (as I do), or even set up their own server, where they would be completely independent of any outside force.

(A couple of years ago, my hosting service without warning blocked VFR because of a single complaint from a party who said he got an unwanted e-mail from me. I spent an an entire weekend hassling with the issue. It was finally resolved when I became humble and remorseful and I begged and pleaded with them and finally they unblocked the site.)

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 01, 2009 07:22 PM | Send