As most of you will know by now, Google deleted my blog for reasons on which one can only speculate. I had been blogging on Google's Blogger for some five and a half years, since April of 2004, and had never had a problem until this week, when I tried to log on to my account and was told that my account was "temporarily disabled... because of a perceived violation of either the Google Terms of Service or product-specific Terms of Service." So, what could that violation be?
Google's policy on so-called hate speech reads:
Blogger strongly believes in freedom of speech. We believe that having a variety of perspectives is an important part of what makes blogs such an exciting and diverse medium. With that said, there are certain types of content that are not allowed on Blogger. While Blogger values and safeguards political and social commentary, material that promotes hatred toward groups based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, or sexual orientation/gender identity is not allowed on Blogger.Further, under Google's content policy, we read:
Hate Speech: We want you to use Blogger to express your opinions, even very controversial ones. But, don't cross the line by publishing hate speech. By this, we mean content that promotes hate or violence towards groups based on race, ethnicity, religion, disability, gender, age, veteran status, or sexual orientation/gender identity. For example, don't write a blog saying that members of Race X are criminals or advocating violence against followers of Religion Y."Promotes hate" is a catch-all term that allows people who are offended by something that someone writes to complain that the writer promotes "hate", and is therefore subject to deletion by Google. I've written a fair amount about human biodiversity (HBD), which was succinctly described by Malcolm Pollack as:
the radical notion that there may indeed be systematic genetic differences of various sorts between human populations, that these variations are a suitable and important topic for scientific inquiry, and that there should be no taboos against such research, or against free discussion of what research already exists.To Malcolm's description I would add "that these variations are of great significance to society and therefore to politics, and that any politics which systematically ignores them is bound to fail to address important questions". However, my blog covered many issues besides HBD (which probably comprised a minority of content), including such topics as immigration; health, diet, and medicine; the decline of the U.S. and the West; Islam; science (most recently Climategate); finance; and in general whatever struck my fancy. In discussions around the internet, I've seen a number of conjectures as to what brought the wrath of Google down on me, which include:
- I annoyed a large drug company with my health posts, such that it brought pressure to bear on Google
- Climategate: Google itself has been accused of manipulating search results on this, so maybe they don't want bloggers discussing it
- HBD (see above)
- Islam: someone suggested to me that Muslims like to complain and that their complaints are taken seriously
- Marijuana: this had come up recently and what I wrote could have been taken by the ill-informed as advocacy
- HIV skepticism
This last one, HIV skepticism, may explain it, as I had written several posts (at least five, I think) on this topic. The journal Medical Hypotheses, edited by my friend Bruce Charlton, had come under attack for printing an article written By Peter Duesberg and others, and the group doing the attacking openly declared that they would like the journal delisted from the National Library of Medicine, Dr. Charlton sacked, and Duesberg silenced. In one of my posts I printed the abstract from Duesberg's paper and drew a comment from Dr. Duesberg as well. The flaw in my theory is that one would have to believe that a company such as Google would take seriously the notion that HIV skepticism is hate speech. But I believe it's entirely possible that they would. I've been surprised and gratified at the numerous posts and comments on the net regarding this affair and my blog, so in turn I would like to thank everyone who wrote or commented (some of the latter being anonymous) or sent me emails, as well as the anonymous commentator at Steve Sailer's who grabbed my blog from cache, made a zip file, and posted it. These include:
Malcolm Pollack, who also offered to help out with setting up a new blog and who put up with a lot of whining from me.
Half Sigma, (also here and here).
Lawrence Auster (also here and here), who generously put aside our differences of opinion.
Rick Darby, also a valued commentator at my old blog.
I also had emails in support from Bruce G. Charlton, Michael Gilleland, Seth Roberts, Daniel, and Jim Collier. (Apologies if you wrote and I've left you out.)
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