Caught in Google's Dragnet

And just like that, Google decided to hand back the post they deleted. Someone reviewed it and found it acceptable. I've looked through it myself, and it's still a mystery to me why it was deleted in the first place. Interested readers can take a look at the post and judge for themselves. Of all the things I've written, it's hardly my most radical post. However, the events are enlightening in that they reveal the mechanisms currently used by censors.

First thing to note is the lack of any bogus links in my post. All links are either internal to my blog, or referring Wikipedia. From this it's clear that the first e-mail from Google did not address the real issue. Their issue must have been with the content of the post, not the links as stated in their mail.

It seems that my post got caught in a dragnet algorithm employed by the censors. Some combination of words must have triggered the algorithm to reject it as hate-speech, which Google censors are required to do by law. It's not that Google censors are evil. They are merely doing their best to keep Blogger clean from thought crimes.

To their credit, Google censors don't trust their dragnet algorithms one hundred percent. They read flagged posts and release the ones caught by mistake. As long as there's no thought crime committed, they let the authors get their flagged posts back. But there's no telling exactly where the line is drawn. The episode may have had the dual purpose of intimidation. Making sure that bloggers express thoughts well inside the Overton Window is high on the wish list of censors.

Censors are a dreary lot who want everyone to be as political correct as they are themselves. They prefer ideas to be well inside the allowed confines of acceptable thought. That makes life easier for them, and it makes them feel comfortable. They don't like it when people stray too close to the limits of acceptable thought.

Googleplex HQ

By The Pancake of Heaven! - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link