Linda Ikeji's Blog - Why Did Google Remove It?

Temitope

Temitope Akinola
Linda Ikeji's blog, one of Nigeria's most visited news and entertainment site was on Wednesday taken down by Google. The award winning Linda Ikeji's blog had been publishing content on Google's Blogger platform.

Google's authority for deleting the blog is unquestionable.

One would however wonder why the so much celebrated Linda Ikeji's blog would be running on a platform that made it vulnerable to an overnight extinction.

I guess both Google and Linda Ikeji would have both been benefiting from the blog and Google would have considered how much they'll be losing if they delete Linda Ikeji's blog.

Why exactly did Google remove Linda Ikeji's blog?
 
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Google, simply by being the host to blogs on its blogger platform shares liability for copyright infringement, and it is within Google's rights/responsibilities to sanction blogs which do not adhere to Google's clearly-spelled out rules and regulations.

For Google to have shut down Linda Ikeji's blog, it would mean she was committing plagiarism with her content, as opposed to speculations of a witch hunt as propounded by a certain cluster of social media commentators.

Google's Manager for Communications and Public Affairs, Anglo-Phone West Africa, Taiwo Kolade-Ogunlade, while speaking with Punch, had this to say on the issue: "To respect the rights of copyright holders, Google clearly spells out how users of its products and services can get permission to use someone else’s intellectual property such as text, songs, images and footages. Google is no respecter of anybody when it comes to the issues of copyright infringement.

“Google as an organisation takes issues of copyright seriously and belongs to a group of digital companies that respect copyrights." (Click here to read more)
 
Google were probably not benefiting that much as most of the ads were direct and not through the google ad network system. The bad press from the copyright issue and her unwillingness to resolve this with her accusers has cost her dearly. The calculation would have been that at worst, google would have taken down adsense, which would not have been too costly.

This could be a big problem for Linda for several reasons
  1. She will not be able to put up the old posts that are disputed as the aggrieved parties will pursue this on any platform
  2. Her cost of operations might be a shock to her. A site with that much traffic will now need to consider premium hosting including load balancers, security against distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks, patching plugins, CDN etc. This could easily run into thousands of dollars per month if not more. She will need to hire someone to look after the technical side. All of this was sorted by google before.
  3. She now has a major credibility problem with advertisers as there is a break in their campaigns and also the nature of the issue. It might not be as easy to get them back on board. The business world is a fickle place.
So it will take some time to get back up to speed and this might not be as immediately resolved as many people expect. She will need the right technical and legal support.

@Jules @Kenneth Chimaobi @Lequte @Chris Maduewesi @Vunderkind @Temitope @leo [USERGROUP=2]@Personal account[/USERGROUP]
 
I don't think Google was benefiting at all. I think - I'm not sure - Linda Ikeji herself alluded to this when she accused the team of Cyber squatters of spamming her until Google took down her adsense.

On number 3 @curator, someone told me that Nigerian advertisers are not as squeamish as theeir Western counterparts and that Linda Ikeji's climb back on the saddle as far as ads on her site are concerned is almost in the bag. What do you think of that?
 
Well most of the advertisers were multinational firms in many cases with some corporate governance. If she has been accused of 'stealing' other people's work, then there will certainly be a problem with some brands not all. I am not saying those companies are clean themselves - it is just the way it is.

I am sure she will get back up - she built the brand up from nothing, but maybe not as quickly as many are expecting as the issues are more complex than initially reported. It is quite a big step for google to take it down. So if a company like google gives you the x mark, there might be some problems.
 
I still find the entire concept of plagiarism as it affects newswriting to be vague. It even gets murkier once I factor in the largely ungoverned hemisphere of blogging.

In academic research, we can take excerpts from subject authorities, credit appropriately and you're not going to spend your life in jail for that.

Linda Ikeji maintains that she credits her sources, but it seems it quite didn't work out for her as an explanation...
 
Well most of the advertisers were multinational firms in many cases with some corporate governance. If she has been accused of 'stealing' other people's work, then there will certainly be a problem with some brands not all. I am not saying those companies are clean themselves - it is just the way it is.

I am sure she will get back up - she built the brand up from nothing, but maybe not as quickly as many are expecting as the issues are more complex than initially reported. It is quite a big step for google to take it down. So if a company like google gives you the x mark, there might be some problems.
it was not removed, she only upgraded it to a full website and this is the addy: www.lindaikeji.mobi......... she she foresaw the crisis coming and she did well in trying to avert it.
 
Hmmmmm... This has made for a very interesting episode. In all, the shut down of the blog goes down as a targeted attack on the blog than anything else. In cases of copyright infringement, Google notifies the administrator(s) of the blog via e-mail to take down specific content with an alternative of filing a counter claim. From my tiny experience, blogs that get shut down the way Linda's got shut down have bitter human factors factored into the equation.
 
Nice contributions! Let's see how Linda Ikeji would bounce out of this. It may take some time really but if she doesn't get discouraged, she'll definitely come out better. But she also need to relearn the rules governing digital publishing so as not to get kicked again.
 
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