So glad to see this progress
If interested, follow the link to the Facebook page. To sum it up, Google closed Mr. Cooper’s blog and email account because of a reader-submitted picture from 10 years ago which someone saw in July and reported as child pornography.
In my opinion, Google should have contacted Mr. Cooper immediately and interacted with him instead of instantly shutting down his blog and email.
Here is a link to my original blog post when I first heard of this.
From Dennis: “I am very, very happy to be able announce that the two month-long Google-related nightmare is over. The gist: (1) My DC’s blog will restart in a new location on this coming Monday. Watch this space. I have the data for the archive of my disabled blog, but it’s not something that can be uploaded into the new blog intact. I will need to restore each post by hand, and since there are many thousands of posts, that restoration will happen very gradually over time. (2) I have the data for the 10 years of correspondence in my gmail account. (3) My GIF novel ‘Zac’s Freight Elevator’ has been rescued. It will be published as a free download this November. More details on that are forthcoming.” Dennis sends his thanks to everyone who signed the petition and shared this story. There is a fuller telling of the events on his Facebook page, and he will also post updates there directing to his new blog: https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1114019298684536&id=214073142012494&pnref=story Going into this, I wasn’t sure what the odds were that Google would reverse itself. A friend who knows the company and the industry told me one in three, tops. It says a lot about the pressure that was brought to bear that it finally happened. The news stories mattered. These signatures mattered. The fact that you commented, shared, talked about this story–it all mattered. And Google deserves credit, too. This shouldn’t have happened in the first place, but in the end, they are a big company with lots of power, and they could have stonewalled forever. That’s just a fact. I understand that the media attention provoked a good deal of internal discussion at the company. I hope that it leads to change and increased thoughtfulness in the way that Google deals with these sorts of speech issues and what it sees as violations of its terms of services; it seems especially important that Google reevaluate the way that users of its platform are notified of potential violations. Finally, I hope that Internet gatekeepers think long and hard before trying to silence writers and artists. There are legitimate reasons for removing people from platforms (harassment and serious violations of the law) but those weren’t the case with Dennis. And when it comes to the communities of writers and artists that gather online, we may not have money, or much power, but we have words, and we make noise. Mark
