I just got an email from various interested parties mentioning a petition asking to remove JEWWATCH from Google1. In particular, they want the Google rankinkgs to be modified so that it is no longer the number one site when you search on Jew (or even on Jew).
(This note, incidently, is not meant to criticise the guy who sent me the original message. It's clear that he was curious about why Jewwatch was down, and not pushing for me to sign anything.)
Google's response2 was, I think, eminently reasonable: they have no interest in tweaking their algorithms to fix specific cases (except for those that expose weakenesses in the algorithms themselves). Indeed, I worry about the idea of Google single-handedly coming in and modifying the results. (One might think about how various groups might wish to affect results around notions like "abortion", or "intifada", or "gay"...)
Of course, I've also seen a fair number of Intenet petitions, very few of which seemed to do much of anything. (Which makes me wonder about the role and purpose of PetitionOnline, in which one can write a meaningless internet poll to push ANY cause).4
I'm reminded of an earlier internet poll that wanted to change How the Internet Worked. Usenet newsgroups (remember them?) could be added with a sufficient vote of interested parties. If enough chihuahua owners thought that we needed rec.pets.dogs.chihuahua, the group could be created. On the other hand, if more dog owners preferred to keep the groups together, the group might be stopped.
There's a lot of reasons why that might happen. For example, it's a pain to read too many groups--and so rec.pets.dogs would lose people who might have valuable things to say to the dog community.
A number of years ago (1996!), the Usenet newsgroup rec.music was feeling irritated at the population who really, really wanted to talk about white power music. And so they started a request for a new newsgroup. Word got out, with huge numbers of miunderstandings and confusions and well-intentioned Nazi stoppers5. A website describing the fiasco is still up, eight years later.
More recently, there was the stop the Taliban! petition (which I saw circulated even after the US had invaded Afghanistan). I'll leave others to your casual exploration at BreakTheChain, a site dedicated to ending online chain mail letters.
It's interesting to see that the limitless potential of the internet, its power to stir--as long as you don't actually have to move--is so often mistaken for real power and real movements.
I do the same thing myself...
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1 Oddly, the site has a few interesting (and conspicuous!) errors on it. For example, they write, "In order for google to remove this They would need a petition of over 50,000 requests". That is, I suppose, vacuously true: Google has made it clear that no number of requests will do it, that they aren't interested in a petition, and that they have already gotten "over 50,000" comments. So if you insist on knowing how many "more" petitions you need, the answer is "lots."
2 Google points out3 that this is partially a linguistic shift. The word "Jew", used alone, is often somewhat derogatorily used; Jewish people say--well, "Jewish". A quick Google search shows a similar phenomenon for Gay vs Homosexual , for example.
3 I think that I have TextAd banner blindness. I had trouble finding that message. I tend to ignore the light blue background--which is a shame, because the ads are actually pretty good.
4 I suppose they are a way of proving that you can get a population of people who are aware of an issue. They are an answer to "no one is watching," or "no one cares"--but they are not an answer to "we have a better reason."
5 You, too, can stop the Nazis! Just SIGN THIS PETITION!
April 16, 2004 10:48 AM | TrackBack | in Design