I repost here the comment I have made on this blog as the original post made me think of more facets to this story and I think this is really important as well:
As I see it, it will only too often lead to completely legitimate blogs being removed/unlisted without a warning, especially since there’s no way for a blog owner to see if his/her blog has been flagged and home many times, and I suspect blogger itself hasn’t decided yet how many times a blog should be flagged to take action on it.
Re: “For example, could a pro-choice blog be taken down by an organised anti-abortion email campaign of “visit this blog and flag itâ€?†– imagine a worse possibility, an eejit with too much spare time on his hands surfing from blog to blog and flagging everything he sees simply for fun – lovely eh? It doesn’t take a campaign or a spammer to cause trouble so.
Re: “carrying the navbar is a small price to pay for free hosting, particularly as the alternative would probably be carrying advertising†– I have news for you. Even without the bar, you’re still carrying Blogger’s ad on your blog – look at your sidebar and there’s the button there that by TOS you’re not supposed to remove either. I didn’t mind the toolbar the way it was but the “Flag†button is definitely more than I’d like to see on my blogs.
All in all, this looks either as a very poorly thought out attempt to get the users to do Blogger’s work for free – without thinking what might come out of it and weighing all the pros and cons – or the beginning of censorship in the Internet – something I’d hate to see ever happen…
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