I’m sure most of us have seen internet drama at one time or another - bloggers talking smack about other bloggers, or posting their pictures and name calling, or vague stories about unnamed people - all designed to create hurt feelings for the people being attached. These bad bloggers, as I like to call them, remind me of 7th graders. Some people do take it a bit further, like the death threat recently posted on a Blogger blog by the name of Cyfswatch. The blog recently posted a death threat against a New Zealand policitian. Even after Google shut down the blog, the site cache was still available in their search engine. (I just checked, and it no longer shows any posts on the blog’s cache)

The blog was run by critics of the New Zealand Child Youth & Family service, and since being shut down on Google, they’ve set up shop on a free wordpress.com blog, located here. (Word of advice guys - if you’re going to do things like post death threats, that’s probably against TOS for ANY free blogging site. You should consider ponying up $5 a month for your own domain and hosting.)

Do I advocate what they did? Not at all. But what really irks me in all of this is that Google NEVER steps in to do anything when the little guy is being harassed online. It’s only when the government of New Zealand is feeling threatened that they saw fit to put an end to it. Average people being harassed or slandered by your garden variety whackjob don’t stand a chance of being helped by Google.

Google spokeswoman Victoria Grand that they stepped in because the site continued to violate 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,” Grand said.

“We really try to remove as little content as possible. 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,” she said.

Google, if you do it for one, you need to do it for all. You can’t pick and choose.

I needed a laugh this morning, and I found it over at Nice Ideas. And to give credit where credit is due, he found it at Internet Tech Blog.

It’s a look back at Google in 1960:

And a look ahead to 2084:

Technorati Tags: Google, search engine, the future of Google