Visitors here in recent days have gotten a screen saying this blog is suspended for violating terms of service.
I learned of it yesterday when I tried to post a new piece and hit a nasty red box. I do write some feisty stuff, but always try to be responsible. My wife suspected I’d finally been busted by the regime. I expressed confidence that we still (largely) have freedom of speech, and that whatever had happened, it would be fixed in a rational system.
I tried to contact WordPress, the host. Then an email arrived, saying I’d been warned several times — I hadn’t received those messages — but now explaining the suspension, and inviting my response.
It concerned not anything I’d written, but comments! In 2017 I’d posted “Why So Many Blacks in Ads?” A serious question which I tried to discuss seriously. This proved to be my most visited blog post ever — attracting the most comments — by far. Continuing thus over the years.
Mostly hair-raisingly racist comments. Believing in free speech, I have refrained from censoring them; and here I wanted to leave those comments up, so people can see just what extremes of vicious racism are out there. I’ve even sometimes pointed to them.
WordPress, however, said I had violated terms of service by not deleting those comments. I replied that I would abide by their requirements. They answered that the suspension is lifted, and specifying some mysterious browser rigmarole I needed to do, in addition to deleting the comments. I replied that I was able to do the rigmarole (I think) but found the blog actually still suspended, blocking my comment deletion. (In the exchange, I believe I was interacting with an AI.)
Then, lo, this morning my e-mail included a routine notice of a new comment (on “Why So Many Blacks” of course). How did that happen? Seems the blog was now indeed unsuspended. So I went in, to delete all the ugly comments. I thought I did it, yet it seems most are still there. Will follow up.
Meantime, oddly enough, I’d been planning to post, as a joke, a fake notice of blog suspension, calling me “Freaky Franky” and a “lunatic leftist scumbag,” ordered by the President with Trump’s signature. I think I won’t do that now.
