Pennants, anyone?
There just aren’t enough flags around, says Joe Lieberman:
Joseph Lieberman, the independent senator from Connecticut, sent a letter to Google CEO Larry Page this week expressing his opinion that Google-owned blogging platform Blogger should provide a button that would let readers of Blogger-powered blogs flag “terrorist content,” according to a report.
In the letter, Lieberman says that alleged pipe-bomber Jose Pimentel, who was arrested by the New York Police Department last weekend, used a Blogger-based blog to spread hate-filled screeds and links to bomb-making instructions.
From which we can conclude that Senator Lieberman doesn’t have a Google account, because if he had been logged in and had dialed his browser to any Blogger page, he’d have seen something like this:
Unless, of course, one is prepared to argue that “terrorist content” does not qualify under existing definitions of “abuse” or under Google’s Terms of Service generally.
Lieberman is apparently prepared to argue exactly that:
The letter continues:
“In September 2008, in response to a previous request that YouTube not allow terrorist content on its servers, Google changed its YouTube Community Guidelines to expressly ban terrorist content. In November 2010, Google introduced a ‘flag’ button for terrorist content on YouTube. I continue to appreciate and commend these important first steps, but I am disappointed that Google has not developed a consistent standard throughout its many platforms. Unlike YouTube’s Community Standards, Blogger’s Content Policy does not expressly ban terrorist content nor does it provide a ‘flag’ feature for such content.”
Link added by me. Said Content Policy appears to fail to meet Lieberman’s standards because neither the word “terrorism” nor any inflected version thereof appears on the page.
In practice, however, just about any damn blog can be flagged for just about any damn thing. The toolbar you see above was snipped from a blog that has the temerity to run news and photos of nudists, a blog which obviously someone deemed flagworthy.
Roger Green »
29 November 2011 · 1:54 am
Nutmeg Joe exhausts me.
Mark Alger »
29 November 2011 · 8:08 am
So what’s Joe’s definition of “terrorism”?
“I know it when I see it?”
M