Directly from John Richardson:
Blogger restored my blog and blamed it on their automated system. “My blog has been restored, I’ve done a total backup, and I’ll be porting the content to my new WordPress blog over the next few days. I appreciate all the support, the help, the advice, and just righteous anger on my behalf. I don’t plan to be at their mercy again.
The message from Blogger said:
“Hello, We have received your appeal regarding your blog (link: http://onlygunsandmoney.blogspot.com/) onlygunsandmoney.blogspot.com. Upon further review we have determined that your blog was mistakenly marked as a TOS violator by our automated system and, as such, we have reinstated your blog. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused in the meantime and thank you for your patience as we completed our review process. Thank you for understanding. Sincerely, The Blogger Team“
So eff and u Blogger and a good thing John is finding a new home. Go ahead and save the following links: onlygunsandmoney.com and onlygunsandmoney.wordpress.com. And be patient, he has to move years of stuff to the new place it does n ot matter if it is in real life or internet, moving sucks the sour one.
The concern I have: what stops WordPress from adopting similar hostile policies?
Not being part of Google?
I get that they are not Google, but do they have real respect for freedom of speech, and will they stand up against attack of that right when it comes to them?
They do not. One of my fave blogs (guess political affiliation) got shut down permanently n the guy migrated to Gab.
They’ll come for us all. Genuinely surprised they backtracked.
Google’s bot has enough autonomy to make the “shutdown” decision itself?
That’s very interesting … and ripe for abuse.
I am a server provider. I.e. I rent Virtual Private Servers(VPS) from different providers around the world in order to allow my clients to host their websites.
Recently, I’ve had to start reading the terms and conditions of my providers to figure out if they are content neutral. And that moves upstream from there.
Two of my favorite providers are AWS (amazon) and Linode. I would never host something controversial on AWS because they have terms and conditions that could easily be turned against me due to client content. The problem is that Linode purchases rack space from Data Centers. Those Data Centers purchase network connectivity from other providers. All of these have their own TOS/AUP which can in turn affect Linode.
If they don’t want you to publish content, they can pressure you, your provider, your provider’s provider and up the chain. It gets bad in a hurry.
Good news. I got the same email. Maybe, just maybe, the public pressure had something to do with it… I hope…