Was Google's network of online services manipulated to silence critics of Barack Obama? That was the question buzzing on a corner of the blogosphere over the past few days, after several anti-Obama bloggers were unable to update their sites, which are hosted on Google's Blogger service.
The bloggers, most of them supporters of Senator Hillary Clinton and all of whom are critical of Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, received a notice from Google last week saying that their sites had been identified as potential spam blogs.
"You will not be able to publish posts to your blog until we review your site and confirm that it is not a spam blog," the Google e-mail message read.
Many of the bloggers were affiliated with JustSayNoDeal.com, a Web site opposed to an Obama presidency.
In an article that appeared on Bloggasm.com, the reporter Simon Owens spoke with some of the affected bloggers, who said they believed that Google had fallen prey to a campaign by Obama advocates. According to the bloggers, Obama supporters clicked on a "flag" on the anti-Obama blogs to make Google believe that they were spam.
Should that be the case, it would be an embarrassment for Google.
On its Web page explaining the "flag" feature, Google says that "it can't be manipulated by angry mobs. Political dissent? Incendiary opinions? Just plain crazy? Bring it on."
On Monday, Google did not explicitly rebut the idea that it had been tricked but said that the cause of the temporary blockage appeared to be elsewhere.
"It appears that our anti-spam filters caused some Blogger accounts to be blocked from creating new posts," a Google spokesman, Adam Kovacevich, said in a statement. "While we are still investigating, we believe this may have been caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the 'Just Say No Deal' network of blogs, which...

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