Wednesday, July 25, 2018

"Blogger blog takedown notification"

I just received an email—which may be fake, but probably isn't—notifying me of the suppression of a blog post of mine: this one here, about the face of a certain religious figure. If you click on the link and can see the post in question, then it could be that the post has simply been "made unavailable" (that's the phrase used in the email) in Pakistan, which is listed as the country "affected" by my post.

Text of the email (URLs removed in case they lead to malware):

Hello,

Google has been notified that content in your blog contains allegedly infringing content that may violate the rights of others and the laws of their country. The infringing content that has been made unavailable can be found at the end of this message. For more information about this removal and how it affects your blog, please visit https://support.google.com/blogger/bin/answer.py?l=en&answer=2402711.

The notice that we received, with any personally identifying information removed, will be posted online by a service called Lumen at https://www.lumendatabase.org. You can search for the notice associated with the removal of your content by going to the Lumen page, and entering in the URL of the blog post that was removed. If you have legal questions about this notification, you should consult your legal advisor.

Terms of Service: https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/
Content Policy: https://www.blogger.com/content.g

The Google Team

Urls affected:
http://bighominid.blogspot.com/2012/10/no-depicting-prophet.html

Countries affected:
Pakistan

When I hover my cursor over the various URLs listed, the sites all seem to check out, so there's a good chance they're legit. The email's content, as you see, leads me to believe this is a region-specific blockage that has come about thanks to local laws (I did, in fact, visit the first URL in the email, which leads one to a site explaining country-specific blockage). Well, if superstitious folk wish to remain inside their bubble, who am I to stop them? As long as the post hasn't been outright removed by Google, I guess I'm OK with countries that want to repress themselves.



2 comments:

Surprises Aplenty said...

I have twice received similar notices about a blog post being blocked in Pakistan. We may be discussing similar posts - mine was about 'Draw Muhammed Day". The email helpfully offered a link expaining how to get around censorship.

Kevin Kim said...

Very interesting! I'm afraid to follow some of the links in the email I got.