Saturday, January 5, 2008

Is MySpace censoring my links?

I can't claim to have thoroughly researched the issue of MySpace censorship—what its scope is and what its agenda is. But I'll tell you what I've personally noticed: among the various links at the top level of my MySpace profile, some are now redirecting to the MySpace home page instead of the places I linked to. Perhaps it's just a malfunction; but here's what else I've noticed: links to two particular publishers are, consistently, among the "broken" links—not only from my own MySpace profile, but also at the MySpace pages of the publishers themselves. Without further evidence that this is intentional, I'll stop short of making any accusations. But I think it's a good idea for those of us with MySpace profiles to keep an eye on what's going on over there.

One thing that I know has been discussed by others is the possibility that MySpace has targeted LGBT-related content for censorship—which, if true, would obviously be deeply troubling.

4 comments:

Sara Winters said...

I don't know, myspace is all about cash these days. It wouldn't surprise me if there was some kind of conspiracy. For my links, all of mine that link through photos work, but the one text link I have on the front of my page won't work no matter what I try. And that one is a pretty harmless link to a book review.

Five Dollar Shades said...

I too have been experiencing this troubling dilema. I send my friends links to my website, www.fivedollarshades.com, and they get redirected to the myspace homepage!! What is going on here?? Is there a way to override this?? I'm sure there is but only myspace engineers probably know. Let me know if you find this answer service@fivedollarshades.com.

Thanks,

Raphael

Anonymous said...

I know this article was written some months ago, but I've noticed something troubling along these same lines this week.

My company's website is being blocked. The worst part is it's being redirected to a page that says my site is either spam, phishing, or a virus. This seriously pisses me off. My site provides web design services for adult entertainers, but in no way violates any of MySpace's TOS. My site has a google ranking of 3, and it trusted by Compete.com and has been for a long time now. The fury this is creating for me that they are sending my visitors to a page with a message like that. I will be forced to remove my profile if they don't correct this soon.

The other site I noticed that had this same redirect was for a film surrounding themes of lesbian relationships. The name of it is "don't go" or something along those lines. I saw the link on my friend's profile and when I clicked it I got the "that link is spam" page.. I had to manually type it in to travel to it.

It seems targeted. I've written to them. We shall see what is done.

Leslie Lynn

Jeremy Edwards said...

Yeah, I've heard more and more people complaining that their links are being sabotaged by MySpace. Personally, I gave up and took down most of the links at my top-level MySpace page. I guess I could have re-entered them all along the lines of "cleispress DOT com"; but it seemed easier (both for me and my readers) just to direct people here for my full set of links.

The "bright side" (if you can think of it that way) is that most regular MySpace users are probably savvy enough about this by now that they won't take the "spam"/"phishing" nonsense seriously. Hopefully, when people get that stupid message it will reflect poorly on MySpace rather than on you.