No Third Term : Th3 ill-fat3d, karmically-doom3d th3rd t3rm of Micha3l Bloomb3rg
Search Engines : Inquiring Minds Want To Know
From The New York Times :
One category of question comes up with puzzling frequency in auto-complete: whether a certain person is gay.
Is Elton John gay? Is Paul Ryan gay? Is Michael Bloomberg gay? The question pops up often, too, when starting searches about George Clooney, the Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez, the actress Ellen Page, Genghis Khan, several cartoon characters and even the pope.
Google Issues Apology ; Tries To Explain Away Censorship As ''A Processing Error.''
Following the censorship of the No Third Term blog, which triggered the suspension of all of my blogs, I spread word about the censorship and asked all my friends to write to Google, asking that they restore my blogs and reïnstate my account. Following is a great YouTube video by Suzannah B. Troy :
I also received help and support from Queens Crap, who posted a blog post about the occurrence of political censorship.
The suspension of the blogs took place before 5 a.m. this afternoon, and the blogs were fully restored shortly after 1 p.m. this afternoon. Here is Google's apology, with no other explanation :
Hi Louis,
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We have reviewed the account and determined that the blogs were removed due to a processing error. The blogs have now been reinstated. We are sorry for any inconvenience or misunderstanding this may have caused.
Best,
Rachel
Google press team
Thank you to everybody, who contacted Google, to ask them to restore my blogs. I am very grateful to you.
Breaking News ! Update on True News From Change NYC Blog
Gary Tilzer's blog, True News From Change NYC, about New York government corruption, political reporting, and other commentary about government transparency, has been restored. Earlier today, it had been discovered that the True News blog had been suspended by Google for inexplicable reasons overnight. The suspension of the blog had become a focal point of support today by many New York bloggers and activists. No reason for the suspension is yet known, but New York bloggers suspect political censorship might have been one motive behind the removal of the blog.
Update : True News From Change NYC Blog Has Been Restored
Google Blogspot Blog Has Been Removed For No Reason ; Blogger Community Suspects Political Censorship ; Call To Action
Please send an e-mail to press@google.com and copy Gary Tilzer, the owner of the censored blog, at Gtprinter@aol.com -- demanding that the True News blog be restored.
True News is a blog dedicated to reporting about government scandals, politics, and transparency. (Here is the cached version of the True News blog.)
This is not the first act of censorship against Mr. Tilzer. Before the 2010 election, a YouTube video that Mr. Tilzer produced was banned by NBC/YouTube and had to be replaced with an edited version. In the last couple of years, others have faced incidences of cyber censorship or retaliatory activity. One and a half months before the 2009 election, the YouTube channel owned by the artist and political commentator Suzannah B. Troy was likewise censored, until bloggers and a lawyer intervened on her behalf. In 2010, this blogger was attacked by computer viruses 3 or 4 times, including on the day this blogger reported to the New York Department of State Committee on Open Government an act of censorship committed by Brad Hoylman.
Flashback : Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hailed Internet freedom as tool to ‘spread truth and expose injustice’
We need your help to keep courageous bloggers, like Mr. Tilzer, doing what they do. If you are reading this, it is because you are turning to the Internet for reliable information. For it to be here, bloggers, like Mr. Tilzer, have to be able to do their work without fear of retribution or censorship.
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