Dennis Cooper vs. Google: The Conclusion

Dennis Cooper
Source: skylightbooks.podbean.com/Yuri Smirnov

As I had covered here before, Google removed transgressive author Dennis Cooper‘s blog and email on June 27th. They gave no explanation to Cooper. Because of how the blog had been a hub for underground literature, it caused a major outcry. PEN America issued a statement, it was covered by many news outlets including the New York Times, and a petition to restore Cooper’s account gained over 4,000 signatures. The complete lack of response from Google prompted the author to hire a lawyer.

After butting heads with Google for over two months, Dennis Cooper finally got closure. On August 26th, he issued a statement on his Facebook page that he was ready to restart his blog. Google had sent him all of the data from his removed blog and email, 10 years worth of content and correspondence as well as the GIF novel he had been working on.

He also received an answer as to why the blog was removed. Speculations that it was due to the content on the blog proved correct.

“For years I used to do these posts on my blog that I called ‘Self-Portrait Day’. I would present a theme or topic and invite everyone who read or commented on the blog to send me related things — writing, images, video, sound files, … really anything that could be uploaded onto a blog,” Dennis Cooper said in his Facebook statement. “Ten years ago, in 2006, I did one of those posts where I asked people to send me things they thought were sexy.”

Cooper had actually taken precautions with this post, knowing it may get him in trouble for pornographic content.

“So I set up that Self-Portrait Day on a separate page off the blog that could only be accessed on the blog through a link with an adult content warning,” Cooper said.

That didn’t seem to help. Apparently, someone had come across that old post and believed that some of the content on that page was child porn. They reported it to Google who removed his accounts.

Cooper’s response to this allegation was, “Now let me just say that I know there are people who don’t know me or my work well and think I’m some kind of ultra-transgressive shock-creating monster, but I completely assure you that if someone had sent me an image that I thought was child pornography, I would never have uploaded it, period.”

I reached out to Google’s press team for commentary on how the company handled the situation. As of when I’ve submitted this article to the editor, they have not responded.

On August 29th, Cooper’s new blog went live at denniscooperblog.com. Cooper will need to manually restore this old posts. With over a decade of content, it’s going to take him a while to get them all posted on the new blog. The GIF novel which was stored on the blog, Zac’s Freight Elevator, is scheduled to release this November.

UPDATE

A day after this article was published, I received the following statement on the situation from a Google spokesperson.

“Through our product policies, we try to provide clear guidelines that give users rules of the road for what kind of content is or is not appropriate. In addition, providing a safe and reliable place for users to store and access their data while expressing themselves freely is very important to us, especially on services such as Blogger. In this specific case, we were made aware of content in the account that constituted a clear violation of our terms of service, and per the Blogger content policy, suspended the account. We worked with the account holder to return other, unrelated content from his account.”

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