Following repeated complaints by ministry of social development, New Zealand, internet giant Google has closed down a blog named Cyfswatch that posted a death threat against a New Zealand politician. Though the blog has been taken down, it’s still in the reach of the users who are using Google search engine. The blog allowed readers to post messages featuring personal info about individual social workers.
If anyone makes a search by entering the name of the ‘deleted blog’, he or she is still able to get all the scratched posts in the “caches” of the site that have been preserved by Google. But, Google says that the very ‘cache’ is “the snapshot that we took of the page as we crawled the web”. Other than that, the participating bloggers have launched a new version of their blog at some non-Google platform.
The blog had a post that read Bradford was a “worthy candidate for NZ’s first political assassination.” New Zealand Green MP Bradford had passed the anti-smacking bill, which would make it an offence for parents to beat their children.
Google spokeswoman Victoria Grand commented on the issue:
It was not just yesterday’s death threat that prompted the site shutdown, but that Google believed it was repeat violation of site rules. “In our terms of service we reserve the right to shut down blogs that have repeat violations, and here we had a repeat violation issue. We don’t want to be a mediator of content and we believe blogs are a platform for free expression and we do everything we can to work with bloggers to keep the content up.
The blog, Cyfswatch, was hosted on Google’s free blogging service, Blogger.
Via: theage
