Tech Friday: Google making its clout felt even on my blog
Posted By RichC on June 12, 2020
Regular readers have likely noticed a few “hopefully” discrete ads running on My Desultory Blog. It is a way for me to experiment with ways to help my customers choose or forgo the use advertising services like Google Ads on their sites. For the most part it has been relatively painless (although nothing to retire on to be sure in my case).
Last week, Google “bots” (or a complaint?) flagged an old post from 2011 referencing my background in photography and photojournalism and the “what not to do” when composing/framing photos. 
Nowadays it is an even bigger deal with all the photo manipulation and deepfakes. My point was that “tweaking photos” was done even before digital Photoshopping became a thing. Often it is used to “better compose” a photo as I cited with the iconic 1970 Vietnam War protest photo on the campus of Kent State University. It was a darkroom manipulated photo for Life Magazine of Mary Ann Vecchio and removed a fence post. Still a “no-no” in the photojournalism world.
Obviously recent events and sensitively by Google (and others) regarding content or in my case photos depicting “acts of violence” or “gruesome, graphic, or disgusting accounts of imagery” are no longer acceptable. I’ve disputed the flagging of my site and content as historic photos are posted on websites (including Google’s own) everyday. This one isn’t posted to glorify violence but as photojournalism instruction.
What should be done: Should I just remove the offending post and photo, bending to the will of the tech giant or resist their pressure to clean up what they determine to be offensive? It sure seems like Big Tech’s policing has a lot of cleaning up to do considering they seem to be targeting the low hanging fruit (my personal blog).
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