I Am Heinrich Heine

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."

Torpedo the Ark Versus the Censor-Bots

Screenshot of my post with sensitive content warning 

 

 

I.

 

D. H. Lawrence famously battled the censors throughout his life as a writer - often describing them as morons infected with the grey disease of puritanism and busy extinguishing the gaiety and rich colour of life, which they find both dangerous and obscene [1].

 

He also thinks of censors as dead men; "for no live, sunny man would be a censor" [2].

 

But of course, Lawrence was writing 100 years ago and things have changed since then. Now censorship is often carried out by an autonomous programme or bot relying on instructions supplied in the form of an algorithm.

 

Take, for example, the following case ...

 

 

II.

 

In ten years of publishing on Blogger - a site owned by Google since 2003 - I have never had any issue concerning content of the 2000 posts. 

 

But the first part of my post on Young Kim's erotic memoir - A Year on Earth With Mr. Hell (2020) - that I published recently (24 Feb), was immediately issued with a sensitive content notice, which warns that I have, apparently, infringed community guidelines (a document which describe the boundaries of what is - and is not - allowed on Blogger).

 

Admittedly, readers can still access the post, but it takes a bit more effort and this will, inevitably, result in a loss of views.      

 

I am unable to appeal this decision: and nor have I been told the exact nature of my offence; i.e., what word, phrase, or idea is so distressing to the censor-bot. 

 

Thus, although I have been invited by Google to update content so as to conform to their guidelines - and then instructed to republish the post so that it's status can be officially reviewed - I really don't know how or where to begin any revision. 

 

Not that I feel inclined to make changes to my text - to effectively self-censor. Did we have done with the judgement of God, merely to accept the judgement of Google ...? I think not. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] In a letter written in November 1928 to Morris Ernst - an American lawyer and prominent member of the American Civil Liberties Union who would later play a significant role in challenging the ban placed on works of literature including James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928) - Lawrence makes his disdain for the censor-moron clear:

 

"Myself, I believe censorship helps nobody; and hurts many. [...] Our civilisation cannot afford to let the censor-moron loose. The censor-moron does not really hate anything but the living and growing human consciousness. It is our developing and extending consciousness that he threatens - and our consciousness in its newest, most sensitive activity, its vital growth. To arrest or circumscribe the vital consciousness is to produce morons, and nothing but a moron would wish to do it." 

 

See: The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton, with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 613.

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Censors', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. by Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 459.