Google Has Locked George Reisman's Blog

[thomtg]

I received a private e-mail from Dr. George Reisman last night saying that his blog has been effectively locked. In an instant message several days earlier, I informed MSK about this, and he suspected foul play on the part of governmental supporters of the status quo. He offered some great suggestions, which I forwarded to Dr. Reisman, who has implemented at least one major piece of it, but it hasn't slowed down the imminent deletion of the entire blog archive within 15 days.

Here is the private e-mail. Do what you will if you care to help.

Thank you all for your support. Google has not only locked my blog but has also started a procedure to block and ultimately delete a replacement blog I spent yesterday and today creating. There's almost no way to get hold of them, neither by phone nor email. Apparently they're notorious for their lack of customer service. (Do a Google search under "Google customer service telephone number" and you'll see.)

The only recourse seems to be write to the company president at their headquarters:

Mr. Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO

Google, Inc.

1600 Amphitheatre Parkway

Mountain View, CA 94043

Below is the message I got just a few minutes ago in response to my attempt to establish a replacement blog [looks hideous, btw]. (The "form" they talk about is identifying a group of badly formed letters and then copying them into a box.)

Any mail any of you care to send to Google would be greatly appreciated.

"Hello,

"Your blog at: http://georgereisman.blogspot.com/ has been identified as a potential spam blog. To correct this, please request a review by filling out the form at http://www.blogger.com/unlock-blog.g?lockedBlogID=1373630155375988852

"Your blog will be deleted in 20 days if it isn't reviewed, and your readers will see a warning page during this time. After we receive your request, we'll review your blog and unlock it within two business days. Once we have reviewed and determined your blog is not spam, the blog will be unlocked and the message in your Blogger dashboard will no longer be displayed. If this blog doesn't belong to you, you don't have to do anything, and any other blogs you may have won't be affected.

"We find spam by using an automated classifier. Automatic spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and occasionally a blog like yours is flagged incorrectly. We sincerely apologize for this error. By using this kind of system, however, we can dedicate more storage, bandwidth, and engineering resources to bloggers like you instead of to spammers. For more information, please see Blogger Help: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=42577

"Thank you for your understanding and for your help with our spam-fighting efforts.

"Sincerely,

"The Blogger Team"

"P.S. Just one more reminder: Unless you request a review, your blog will be deleted in 20 days. Click this link to request the review: http://www.blogger.com/unlock-blog.g?lockedBlogID=1373630155375988852"

[DavidMcK]

To what address would we send mail to Google to help Reisman's blog?

[thomtg]

To what address would we send mail to Google to help Reisman's blog?

David, I quoted you the entire e-mail message from Dr. Reisman. Presumably, the Google address is the snail-mail address. This real hassle is what makes the attempt to silence a renowned capitalist so sinister.

[Alfonso Jones]

The blog is available at the moment.

Bill P

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

This happened in the middle of last year to anti-Obama supporters of Hillary Clinton. See this article:

Google and the Anti-Obama Bloggers

By Miguel Helft

June 30, 2008

New York Times

"Bits"

From the article:

Did Google use its network of online services to silence critics of Barack Obama? That was the question buzzing on a corner of the blogosphere over the last few days, after several anti-Obama bloggers were unable to update their sites, which are hosted on Google’s Blogger service.

The bloggers in question, most of them supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, and all of them opposed to Senator Obama, received a notice from Google last week saying that their sites had been identified as potential “spam” blogs. “You will not be able to publish posts to your blog until we review your site and confirm that it is not a spam blog,” the Google e-mail read.

. . .

On Monday, Google would not explicitly rebut the idea that it had been tricked but said that the cause of the temporary blockage appeared to be elsewhere. “It appears that our anti-spam filters caused some Blogger accounts to be blocked from creating new posts,” a Google spokesman, Adam Kovacevich, said in a statement. “While we are still investigating, we believe this may have been caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the ‘Just Say No Deal’ network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam. We have restored posting rights to the affected blogs, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression.”

I admit that there may be some employees of Google who are so partial to Obama that they would do this, although I doubt they would continue at Google for too long if they were caught.

I am sure that the Obama camp has some disgruntled nasty-minded computer-savvy folks who like to manipulate things and skew data. They have proven this time and time again.

I believe the present wave of spam-targeting (mostly, falsely attributing spam to) libertarian-like Blogger blogs was to counter the national success of the Tea Parties. President Obama's stuff is tanking and they can't allow the truth about why to be told—at least until he consolidates his power into a more "dictatorship of the proletariat" model.

One thing should cause concern. Hillary didn't win the nomination despite dishonest stuff like this from the Obama side, so maybe it was because of it...

Michael

[Neil Parille]

This is a blog I enjoy and google is threatening to shut it down --

http://www.claudemariottini.com/blog/

-Neil Parille

[thomtg]

News Update:

The Google blog of Dr. George Reisman is no longer classified as a spam blog and has been unlocked for posting and editing. His side of the story is newly posted here.

He said he has learned his lesson and is currently porting the blog's contents away from Google's reach. The ending paragraph of the message asks for readers' help on how to export the links:

If any reader knows how to port over links from Google’s Blogger to Word Press, I hope he will share his knowledge with me. The abundance of links to many of the postings on the Google version of my blog serve to keep me tied to Google. Please write to me at

georgereisman@georgereisman.com

.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Thom,

If George is using Wordpress 2.7 (actually 2.7.1 now) on his own hosting (which I dearly hope he is), it's not complicated. See here on the Codex Wordpress site:

Starting the importer

WordPress 2.7

In the left-side navigation, click Tools to expand the submenu. Next, scroll down if necessary and click Import to show the various import options. Next, click Blogger and follow the directions.

I haven't messed with this, so I am not 100% sure about links, but I don't think there should be any problem.

If he is using a hosted Wordpress blog (meaning not his own hosting, but instead his address is www.nameofblog.wordpress.com), it might be a little more complicated.

I will have a look around.

Michael