Banned From Google

On January 7th I tried to access my account and Google told me that my account and my blog, everything that I had, was removed. I have no idea to this point why they would do something like this.

It took me about four days of complaining to Google in appeal forms to make them finally overturn their decision. I actually thought these appeal forms are all worthless and never achieve anything, they are just their for the public to make them think that Google actually cares about them, it is just a way to make them feel better on the inside. Just consider how big and powerful Google is, what would be their incentive to listen to some pathetic blogger complain to them? All they have to do is hit "delete" and I am gone, forever, nobody knows, nobody cares, why should they, complete strangers, care?

So when Google told me that they "apologize for any inconvenience" I was shocked. Google can make a mistake? They are the cyber-gods. How can they make a mistake? How can they care for the complaints of mere individuals?

I am not sure if you know this, perhaps you also had this problem, but when you get your entire account banned by Google there is an appeal form to prove that you are the user. Since Google maintains your privacy they do not accept your documentation papers, like photo ID, passport, and so forth. They have no idea who you are, why would they accept documents like those? So to prove to them that they are who you say you are you need to answer some questions about your account that only the real account owner would know about. They ask you for your e-mail contacts. They ask you for your labels in Gmail. They ask you for approximate date of creation of you account and when you started using their services. And a few other questions.

If you fail their appeal form they will reject your appeal and you can re-submit a new one. I had to do this a total of four times. Each time I remembered a bit more detail about my account. The fourth time something finally hit in and Google responded to me differently. They told me that my account was suspended for TOS (terms-of-service) violations.

This time I had to submit a different kind of appeal form. This one was much less automated and you had the freedom to write your statement personally because it was going to be reviewed by people. The first thing I did when I woke up today is obsessively check my e-mail and I was happy to learn that Google had reversed their decision.

When I was told I had TOS violations. I got scared. There were only two possible violations that I could have thought off. First, I had copyright violations on this blog. But this did not worry me because the only videos I link to are either YouTube videos (almost all of them) and a few MegaVideos. Both of which are not considered to be copyright violations. Second, I violated their "hate speech" agreement. Google does not mention this in their TOS but I have been suspended from YouTube for two videos that were called "hate speech" by YouTube and deleted. I made those videos over a year ago. I got two strikes on my account, suspended for two weeks, and YouTube told me that if I got another strike I would be permanently banned, my videos were also taken down. YouTube claimed to be for an open discussion but when they recieved complaints from people about what I posted they were happy to take them down. I was afraid that Google was the same way. If you post stuff which is offensive, especially when it is related to race, sex, or gender, then it can be called "hate speech" and get removed by Google standards. But this violation did not scare me. I figured that the chances that I received this kind of violation was very low because Blogger, by its nature, is made specifically for people to be offensive.

Rather I guess they suspended me for a different reason. Google uses an automated spam detection system and my blog got classified under "spam". So it was automatically removed. I had to prove to Google that I am not spam. This is what I think happened. I cannot think of any other good explanation to why I got shut down. The only two reasons that have a chance to apply to me are weak reasons to consider. Since I cannot think of anything else I am sticking with this as their official reason.

I did have a question however, how do I "unfollow" myself. Somehow the only thing that changed is that I am a self-followerer which seems kind of ridiculous to do. I would like to remove that but I do not see how it is done.