Google’s Jihad Against Conservative Websites?
January 5th, 2007 at 6:20 pm by BrianUPDATE (from Cranky), When trying to visit American Spectator’s blog site, my trustee McAfee virus software popped up this message.
ps Google still sucks beyond words or phrases.
Noel Sheppard takes a break from the beach to note that Google and their apparatchiks at StopBadWare.org are having a little fun at The American Spectator’s expense this holiday season:
A funny thing happens if you Google the name of one of America’s leading conservative magazines: a warning comes up stating, “This site may harm your computer.”Think I’m kidding?
A screen-capture of the first page of Google web search results for “American Spectator” follows..
They then go onto a page that does not allow you to access the site in question. For your protection, you see?
Some malicious act on Google’s part or the Stopbadware folks? Per StopBadWare’s site (and as indicated in the comments by StopBadware’s Online Organizer), Google reported spectator.org as bad.
Google News – They Report, They Decide.
A cursory look at the Harvard peeps behind Stopbadware consists of your typical mish-mash of Democrat activists (I’m sure you can find a lot more if you just googlesearch a few names with “democrat” after them or opensecrets.org searches) so it’s not hard to imagine that their Abstinence Only policy towards different ideas wouldn’t be welcomed.
Now I’ve got no particular love for The Spectator as I quit reading them when they refused to disassociate themselves from Doug Bandow, but that’s my personal choice. A choice that Google and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society is more than happy to make for you apparently.
Not to worry if your traffic has been bottlenecked by their decision though. They’ll be back from their Ramahanakwanzmas vacation to mao-mao your complaints next week. After all, the internet is not accessible from Winter break.
It’s not like this was the first time Mountain Valley’s finest and their fascist webmonkeys have set their ideological sights on the conservative web.
The deceptive Spectator parody site is still available without comment.
January 2nd, 2008 at 10:51 am
Hi Brian,
I work for StopBadware.org, and noticed your post about the Google warning on the Spectator website. I hope I can help clear up some of your questions, and reassure you that the Google warnings are not in any way ideologically motivated.
It’s actually Google, not StopBadware, that flagged the Spectator site. Google independently checks the web for badware and badware-linking code, and places warnings in its own search results. StopBadware comes in simply to help site owners who want to remove the warnings in learning about badware and getting the warnings removed.
It is not possible for anyone to falsely report a site to Google or StopBadware and have a warning placed in search engine results. Google independently identifies sites that host or distribute badware, and places warning pages based on their own internal identification and testing. A warning is never placed simply due to an unverified report from the public.
Further, the warnings have nothing whatsoever to do with the political or other content of a site, and are entirely and solely based on Google’s determination of a malware danger at the site. Such dangers can be from software offered for download, but are far more frequently due to hidden “drive-by download” redirects placed onto a site by malicious hackers. In those cases, often the website owners themselves are not aware that their site is distributing malicious software.
Many sites that are the subject of Google’s warnings have been the victims of a malicious hacking attack, in which code linking directly to badware through exploits was inserted onto an otherwise innocent, but poorly secured, website. Another common reason for otherwise innocent sites to be flagged by Google is if badware is being distributed through third party provided content such as ads provided by an ad network.
To remove the warning, the Spectator’s site’s owners will need to discover what code on the site caused Google to flag the site, and then clean and secure the site. Then they can submit a request for review. They can submit a review request to Google directly by logging in to its Webmaster Tools as a verified site owner. While StopBadware was closed for Harvard University’s winter break, during that time website owners were encouraged to use Webmaster Tools to request reviews. Now that we are back in the office, the Spectator’s owners can also submit a review request to StopBadware using our Request for Review form, available on our homepage.
Further information is available on our information page for owners of sites with Google warnings and our Security Tips on finding and removing badware .
Erica George
StopBadware staff
January 2nd, 2008 at 6:58 pm
Hi Erica. Thanks for your response. As indicated above and on your site, StopBadware indicates Google is the impetus for the disclaimer which keeps people from visiting The Spectator so that absolves StopBadware as far as I’m concerned.
StopBadware comes in simply to help site owners who want to remove the warnings in learning about badware and getting the warnings removed.
A couple of questions if you have a moment. So, per your response, StopBadware is going to help the Spectator to resolve this issue? Is this a free-of-charge service?
How hard can it be for Google to indicate the exact reason behind blacklisting The Spectator? Or to simply shoot them an e-mail to let the alleged offending webmaster know what they are about to do and have an opportunity to correct it?
Electronically, it’s the equivalent of hanging a failing health score on the front door of a restaurant. I’m interested to know what prompted the flagging of The Spectator ,even though I don’t read it anymore, as I never fail to be skeptical of Google’s intentions across an array of subjects.
Any additional insight is appreciated.
January 3rd, 2008 at 11:32 am
Hi Brian,
I’m always happy to answer questions. With regard to the help we offer to sites that have been flagged, due to the sheer numbers our staff ourselves can’t individually help the site owners, but we do offer both information and a discussion group community where more individualized help can be sought.
I realize the links I tried to include in my first reply didn’t post, but the two main informational resources we offer are an FAQ that answers most common questions about the flags, and a Security Tips page with information on common website compromises, and how to locate and deal with them. We also offer a one-stop page displaying our information about a site, which is the page anyone coming to us from a Google warning will first see. That page for the Spectator (which has links to the other pages) is:
located here
The FAQ is http://www.stopbadware.org/home/faq#partnerwarnings
The Security Tips page is http://www.stopbadware.org/home/security
Our discussion group, where many website owners have found help through our volunteer members.
We also offer one of the two ways a website owner can request a review of their site, once they have cleaned it up or if they have been unable to discover the badware problem. A site owner can request a review through us or through Google’s Webmaster Tools console, if they have logged in and verified as the site’s owner. For reviews submitted to us, we can then display the ongoing status of the review on a history summarized and linked in full from the landing page.
In terms of what Google indicates, they do give some information to verified site owners via Webmaster Tools from the start. To our best knowledge, they also make an effort to reach website owners by email. There’s more information about that in our FAQ.
I understand your skepticism of Google – it’s always healthy to be skeptical of actions taken by entities with lots of power. I can assure you that we have never seen any evidence of any sort of political or other bias in the patterns of sites Google has flagged and reported to us. When we first began working with Google, we actually tested every single site they had flagged to verify that we were finding the same things. Over the more than a year that we’ve worked with them on their malware warnings initiative, we’ve seen Google flag sites from all around the world, and all parts of the political, religious, and economic spectrum. There have been large nonprofits, government agencies, political parties, churches, mom-and-pop stores, personal blogs…. Pretty much any kind of website you could imagine. The folks working to distribute badware care less about the content of a site, and more about how easy it is to compromise the site.
It looks like the Spectator has not submitted any request for review through us. If you have any contacts there, and want to share with them the information I’ve posted here, that might help them solve this faster. I have been trying to create an account at NewsBusters to post in reply to the thread there, but haven’t been approved, nor am I sure if my emailed comment to the NewsBusters author went through. There are definitely people ready and willing to help – there is actually already a thread about the Spectator on our discussion group, here.
I hope that helps, and feel free to ask more questions!
Erica