Did Google Block “Barry Soetoro” Search Term?
Screenshots obtained by a Prison Planet reader suggest that Google may have moved to de-list “Barry Soetoro” as a popular search term shortly after it rose to the top of the Google Trends charts after yesterday’s effort by radio talk show host Alex Jones to focus attention on Barack Obama’s real name.
The search term reached number one on Google Trends soon after Alex Jones began discussing the issue on his show yesterday and Prison Planet.com released an article on the same topic. However, within the space of about an hour, the term quickly slipped down the list of hot search terms and by the end of the day was gone completely.
A screenshot captured by a reader gives us an insight as to why the term didn’t remain in the number one spot on Google Trends for very long. Upon attempting to perform a Google search for “Barry Soetoro,” one of our readers was met with a Google screen that stated, “We’re sorry….but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.”
Click for enlargement.
The big question revolves around whether Google moved to block the term to certain IP addresses, or whether the ban was Internet-wide.
Despite Google’s apparent efforts to block searches for “Barry Soetoro,” the term was still number one on Google Trends overall for August 9th.
At no point did Alex Jones encourage listeners to use auto-bots to send automated search queries to Google, nor was this ever mentioned on any of his websites. Did Google deliberately prevent people from searching the term in order to suppress information about Barack Obama’s real name when he was registered as an Indonesian citizen being Barry Soetoro in order to prevent the topic from going super-viral?
The suggestion is perfectly plausible given the fact that Google have been vehemently supportive of Obama since the early days of his election campaign.
Obama and Google have always enjoyed an intimate relationship, with Google’s former chief lobbyist Andrew McLaughlin going on to become Barry’s deputy chief technology officer. Emails released recently by ethics watchdog the National Legal and Policy Center revealed that McLaughlin was using his government email account to co-ordinate meetings with Google lobbyist Marckham Ericsson and Google front group Free Press.
Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt publicly backed Obama and campaigned on his behalf before the 2008 Presidential election. Google was Obama’s 5th biggest financial backer, contributing $803,436 dollars to his campaign.
Schmidt was also part of Obama’s financial transition team, and at one stage was even being touted as Soetoro’s technology czar.
Google’s apparent effort to block searches for a particular term is unprecedented, and smacks of political censorship in the vein of Chinese-style Internet policing. For the sake of free speech on the web, we hope that the block was merely a technical glitch, and we invite Google to explain why it occurred.
