Wednesday, December 27, 2006

The Blogspot Free Speech Policy

We read:

"Leading international Web log hosting service BlogSpot -- owned by Google -- is currently hosting several sites for terrorist networks such as al Qaeda in Iraq, who are using the free service to post their blogs in German, English, and Arabic.

After receiving complaints about these sites, Google posted a disclaimer that reads: "Some readers of this blog have contacted Google because they believe this blog's content is hateful. In general, Google does not review nor do we endorse the content of this or any blog."

Google maintains a policy of free expression, even if some of their blogs are unpopular or deemed offensive, moving to take down a site only if there's a threat against a specific individual.

Source


This is a perfectly acceptable policy to almost all libertarians: Warnings are fine. Censorship is not. It is encouraging that the Blogspot tentacle of Google is very different from the Google News tentacle. Most of my blogs would be off the air if Blogspot followed the same policy as Google News.

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