The Vanishing Blogspot Blog of Dennis Cooper

June 27, 2016: Dennis Cooper is on his computer and his Gmail suddenly reloads and he is logged out.

He tries to log back in and instead of his inbox there is a message saying his account had been disabled.

He checks his blog http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/ that he has been doing for 10 years on Blogspot, Google's blogging platform. The blog is gone.

The only information he has been able to get since comes from a link that was there saying that the suspension was due to a violation of Blogspot’s terms of service.

Lost blog. Lost mail. What violation? No clue.

Cooper does blog about sex - also death, violence, male escort tales and abandoned things, plus a “GIF novel” made up of GIFs found online. Maybe he did violate some term of service. If so, where is the warning, or explanation, or opportunity to export his content? 

He hasn't gotten any response to queries. he even had a lawyer contact Google. I have several blogs on Blogger and I don't like this. Plenty of others are angry or would like an explanation. If this happened to me, I couldn't afford a lawyer to battle Google. I wouldn't get articles about me or in my defense from newyorker.com or nytimes.com or theguardian.com.

My own experience with Google doing some evil was when - without warning and without any way to get an an explanation or recourse (Sound familiar?) - my Google Adsense account was suspended "for life." (read my post on that)  Why? Our best guess was that because we had been hit with a server attack, they viewed it as some way of boosting our ad "hits." 

What happened to Do No Evil and transparency, Google?



 


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