Portrait of Heinich Heine
by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1831)
I.
Readers may recall that I recently had a run-in with the Google censor-bots [1] that now patrol the sites hosted by Blogger, seeking out content which infringes their community guidelines.
Several posts on Torpedo the Ark have now been flagged for review and subsequently placed behind warning notices which let readers know that they contain sensitive content.
Although they can still access the offending posts if they wish to do so, readers must first acknowledge these notices and confirm they are old enough to access adult material.
As for me, I'm invited by the Blogger Team to update the content so as to adhere to Blogger's guidelines; once I have done so, I can then republish the posts and ask that their status be reviewed.
II.
If all this wasn't troubling enough, Google have now gone a step further and actively deleted a post - without any prior notice or permission sought - on the grounds that it doesn't simply infringe but violates their guidelines - which is a particularly strong term to use.
Just for the record: the post in question - 'On the Figure of the Prostitute' (15 May 2013) - did not advocate vice nor lend support to the illegal sex trade; nor did it use an image that could possibly be described as obscene or pornographic.
In fact, the post was a critique of sexual exploitation within a free market economy and phallocratic order, which affirmed the feminist position that within such an order there are no bad women, only bad laws.
So, I'm a little puzzled as to what it is Google find so offensive in the above post - and I'm more than a little troubled by the threatening (and fascistic) nature of their closing remark:
"We encourage you to review the full content of your blog posts to make
sure that they are in line with our standards, as additional violations
could result in termination of your blog."
One can only respond to this by paraphrasing the words of the nineteenth century German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine: Where they terminate blogs, they will, in the end, terminate human beings too ... [2]
Notes
[1] See the post entitled 'Torpedo the Ark Versus the Censor-Bots' (1 March 2023): click here.
[2] In his play of 1821, Almansor, Heinrich Heine wrote: "Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen."
It's utterly depressing. Worst still, there's nobody you can really talk to or complain to. At least with an annoying boss you learn to tolerate each other. But with this form of censorship, the human is completely removed from the conversation and you are at the whim of an impersonal algorithm with no awareness of context or nuance. I would make sure that all of your blogs are backed up just in case the account does get erased.
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