CYBERSPACE—Last week, ZDNet columnist Violet Blue tweeted her concern that Google was disabling goo.gl shortlinks for Naked Sword without warning, and asked if it was happening to anyone else. Bacchus at erosblog.com responded with an article that expressed dissatisfaction with URL shorteners in general, but which especially took Google to task for its longtime practice of "letting an automated algorithm declare certain link targets to be 'spam' and then disabling the shortened links to them," and more to point, for expressing its opinion that all porn is spam through its shortlink algorithms.
"The robots don’t give a damn because Google doesn’t give a damn; the concept of a 'legitimate porn link' seems not even to be on their radar," asserted Bacchus.
Yesterday, the Google shortlink story got another boost when Bacchus published an update on the situation in a post titled, The Google Shortlinks #Pornocalypse In Action, where he wrote, "Remember last week when I blogged about rumors that Google was disabling certain shortlinks built using the Goo.gl link shortener, if the link targets were porn sites? Well, thanks to a pair of tweets from Rain DeGrey attempting to share a photo from HardTied.com, right now you can see that that little chunk of the #pornocalypse in live action."
Two tweets about 15 minutes apart from yesterday afternoon include one containing a goo.gl shortlink supposedly to the Hardtied photo. The second tweet states, "Evidently Google could not deal with the awesomeness that is @DarlingBDSM and disabled the link to her shoot :( Fine." She also adds the full link to the site.
The HardTied shortlink was indeed disabled, and if clicked lead to a page with a message reading, "http://goo.gl/GzBYwo – this goo.gl shortlink has been disabled. It was found to be violating our Terms of Service. Click here and here for more information about our terms and policies respectively."
Bacchus commented, "The only sentence in the two policy links Google offers that seems even remotely relevant is this one: 'Do not use this service for spamming or linking to content that may harm other users.'"
He adds in conclusion, "The modern state of Google’s anti-spam software: there’s a rule in there that assumes that porn and spam are the same thing. Don’t be evil? My ass."
What is disturbing about this situation is that whereas in the past, Google has defended its disabling of shortlinks when they were used inappropriately—say, in emails sent en mass to many hundreds of people—arguing that their terms and conditions are quite clear about their prohibited use as spam, extending the practice to Twitter, a place they have traditionally wanted their shortlinks to be used, suggests yet another move on the part of the Internet's most influential company to penalize porn.
That belief was also expressed by Bacchus in the June 17 response to Violet Blue about Naked Sword, in which he observed cynically but understandably, "My speculation and prediction is that Google would claim (will claim, if they can ever be induced to respond at all) that Naked Sword was not targeted specifically; rather, the notion would be that the Naked Sword shortlinks were determined to be spam by the implacable and unaccountable software machine. My own gloss on that is that Google’s rolling #Pornocalypse sweeps all porn before it. The company is so hostile to porn that it increasingly treats all porn as spam. (Anybody who has watched the decline in quality of porn-oriented searches on Google knows what I mean by this.)"
In somewhat related news, Bing is apparently still adored by the unwashed porn masses.
