Almost Blacklisted by Google

I recently had an interesting experience with Google. An article from 2016 was flagged by the Blogger platform as violating their community terms of use. It wasn't removed, but it was censored in that you have to agree that you were an adult to read it – and sign in via a Google log-in.

The article in question was simply some comments I offered in reference to a William Buckley interview with Mark Felt and Roy Cohn from 1976. I cannot really figure out why it was flagged apart from the fact that I used terms like 'Deep State' or maybe suggested there were some conspiracies at work during that period.

The email said it was 'reported' – it could be. It could have been someone that stumbled upon it and was offended or one of the many people that wish me grief. I have no idea. It might have just been picked up by AI filters – but if that was the case I would think there would be many more articles I've written that would be flagged.

Anyway, I re-read the piece and believed it to be balanced enough to pass any censor's scrutiny – and obviously I cannot be charged with encouraging some kind of violent behaviour or criminality. I can't even imagine what I said in that piece that would lead someone to find it offensive – to the point of 'turning me in'.

I appealed the judgment and to my surprise – they acquiesced. I'm wondering if some kind of filter or software flagged it – too many suspicious terms or something and then upon my appeal, a human actually looked at it. I don't know but obviously a second look assuaged any fears and now the article is freely available once more.

I did note that several of the YouTube links are now defunct and thus I need to see if I can re-locate them. Increasingly I'm inclined to just archive that stuff myself and host it if need be in another format as a growing number of videos and articles seem to be disappearing from cyberspace – or at the very least are becoming much more difficult to track down.

Obviously there's a great deal of talk about this sort of thing at present – people waking up and finding their websites locked up or gone. In some respects I guess I wouldn't surprise me if that happened other than I can't imagine I'm on anyone's radar as my readership is miniscule when compared to other popular and even sometimes provocative content producers. It was an interesting little exchange to say the least and I hope doesn't happen again – but time will tell.

Here's a link to the article:

http://pilgrimunderground.blogspot.com/2016/08/deep-state-players-in-1976.html