Google is back in the news. This time it’s because it shut down several anti-Obama blogs on its Blogger service, labeling them “splogs” or spam blogs. The bloggers involved, all ardent supporters of Hillary Clinton, received emails that said their blogs had been shut down. “You will not be able to publish posts to your blog until we review your site and confirm that it is not a spam blog,” it said.

          “It appears that our anti-spam filters caused some Blogger accounts to be blocked from creating new posts,” Google spokesman Adam Kovacevich said in a statement. “While we are still investigating, we believe this may have been caused by mass spam e-mails mentioning the ‘Just Say No Deal’ network of blogs, which in turn caused our system to classify the blog addresses mentioned in the e-mails as spam. We have restored posting rights to the affected blogs, and it is very important to us that Blogger remain a tool for political debate and free expression.”

This is just the latest embarrassment for Google. Earlier this year its Adsense network suffered several outages, and then it accidentally spammed it’s own members with an erroneous warning that their accounts needed to be updated or they would be suspended. It also brings up the question of whether spam filters could be abused to sway support for a particular candidate by being used to block the supporters of the other. As the presidential campaign unfolds, this is definitely a topic to be watched!